1 “Ezra Pound's Fascism: Aberration or Essence?”

By

Leon Surette

Read at Waterloo Lutheran University Feb.    17, 1989.   

Published in Queen's Quarterly 96 (Autumn 1989) 601-24.

Lightly revised and with updated scholarly references.    (Leon

Surette, April 2015)

Long evaded by Pound scholarship, the question of Pound’s

Fascism11 has once again become discuss-able, largely because

Modernism itself is now under attack as an aesthetic movement

said to be fundamentally Fascist in ideology..    Although no one

in possession of the facts could ever have doubted that Pound's

loyalties during the 1939-45 war were with Italy and not with his

native country, it was not thought to be possible to admit such a

thing without risking the complete obliteration of Pound from the

literary canon.    The situation is a little different today.   

The emergence of a powerful academic wave of neo-Marxism in the

American academy has made Fascism a common topic of academic

discussion, and has revived the old “Manichean” opposition --

dating from the Spanish civil war -- in which the political

spectrum is divided between Communists and Fascists, with no room

left for liberal democratic capitalism.    Amongst advanced

thinkers this political binarism has substantially replaced the

old one of Democracy vs Totalitarianism.    According to current

intellectual fashion only Right Wing reactionaries now hold to

that old view, and some of them hold high political office.

The neo-Marxist critique contrasts strongly with the older

liberal-democratic critique of Pound and Modernism as politically

reactionary -- a critique represented by John Harrison and

William Chace.    Harrison, in his 1966 study, The Reactionaries,

isolated nationalism, corporatism, and elitism as the touchstones

of modernist reaction and the contrary of proper liberal

democratic attitudes.    Chace, in The Political Identities of Pound and

Eliot (1973), found that it was radicalism that led them away from

liberal democratic values rather than any particular affinity

between the Modernist ethos and Fascism.    Chace argues that we

must put Pound and Eliot into historical perspective if we are to

understand the place and weight of their political affiliations

(or lack of them in Eliot’s case) and he is surely correct on

this point.   

More recently Peter Nichols has assessed Pound's Fascist

sympathies from a neo-Marxist perspective in which such notions

as authority, reason, and philosophy are regarded as bourgeois

illusions having a natural affinity with Fascism (Nichols, 79-

103).    Nichols also points out tellingly that Pound's oft-

admired distinction between "ideas in action" and mere abstract

principles can be traced to Giovanni Gentile's Dottrina del fascismo

(Nichols, 97-99)22.    The neo-Marxist critique offered by

Nichols is much more ubiquitous now than the old liberal one

mounted by Harrison and Chace (see Perloff, "Fascism"), but both

critiques share the assumption that Pound’s Fascism represents at

least in part a natural and coherent consequence of his views on

other matters.    They reject the defence that it was merely an

“aberration,” an inexplicable tic like Yeats’s occultism or

Joyce’s superstitious attitude toward dates.    Clearly they are

right to reject such a defence.    On the other hand it is

difficult to be entirely comfortable with an analysis of Pound

and Modernism from both ends of the political perspective –

liberal democratic and Marxist egalitarian – which agree only in

condemning Modernism as a faulted cultural moment.33

Marjorie Perloff takes on the neo-Marxist condemnation of

Pound and Modernism by pointing out that American Marxism, at

least, did not distinguish itself by opposition to Fascism, but

rather followed the Stalinist policy of appeasement until 1941

(Perloff, “Fascism”).    More generally, she denies that

political virtue and vice can be cleanly divided between Marxists

and non-Marxists in the Modernist period:

    The poetics of Modernism, as Alfred Kazin rightly

argues, must undergo severe scrutiny, for the Modernist

(which is to say, late Romantic) subordination of life (and

hence political consciousness) to "art," its insistence that

the artist has no responsibility to anything but his or her

art, has had serious consequences.    But, and here I part

company with Kazin, the implication that Marxist Modernists

were immune from this particular historical dilemma, that it

was a dilemma of the Right, is simply not so and

contemporary Marxists have no reason to feel superior when

they examine the Modernist ethos. (Perloff, “Fascism” 19)

In these remarks Perloff offers, I think, a wise and cogent assessment of the issue at stake here: responsibility for the collective violence which has so

marred this century.    It is important to recognize that World

War II and the Nazi death camps were neither the first nor the

last, but only the largest and most reprehensible of almost

innumerable acts of collective violence both before 1939 and

after 1945. It is difficult to make this next observation without

engaging political or nationalist passions that one would wish to

keep in abeyance, but it must be said that all ideological sides,

and many nations on all sides have been guilty of frightening

acts of violence.    Perhaps one of the greatest distortions of

the history of this century is the notion that all human evil was

concentrated in the Germans between 1933 and 1945.    So long as

we suppose that opposition to Hitler and the Axis powers was

enough to certify one a saint and association with them enough to

certify one a war criminal, there is only one response to Pound's

Fascism: we must disown him and all his works.   

Such a supposition has long prevented cool discussion of

Pound's politics.    That it is erroneous should be obvious to

anyone in possession of a little historical information.   

Marxists conveniently forget that the Communist Soviet Union

(USSR) remained friendly toward Hitler's Germany until it was

actually invaded, despite the stand-off of the Spanish Civil War.

And Stalin's alliance with Britain and the USA did nothing to

help the millions of victims of his regime.    On the other hand,

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was regarded by many Americans – not

just Ezra Pound – as a war monger and almost a traitor because of

his eagerness to oppose Hitler’s Germany.    Events in the Far

East, in North Africa, in Equatorial Africa, in Central America,

and in the Middle East between 1945 and the present have surely

taught us that the human capacity for evil is widely distributed

and respects no ideological or national borders.   

We should be mature enough to recognize that the vast

majority of us choose sides on l emotional and historical grounds

– on grounds of loyalty or patriotism or self-interest – rather

more than through dispassionate analysis.    Ideology and

morality commonly serve only to rationalize choices made on other

grounds.    Indeed, the traitor is one who changes his or her

natal loyalties – like Pound – even if he or she does so on

ethical grounds – like Edward Snowden.    There is no question

that Pound removed his loyalties from the United States and gave

them to Italy.    The question we must answer is why he did so. 

Was it for ideological, personal, cultural, intellectual, or

psychological reasons?    The answer cannot be as simple as in a

multiple-choice examination.    All five reasons played a role. 

The psychological reasons, however, were not insanity but

arrogance and impatience.    The intellectual reasons were not

quite stupidity, but certainly a failure to understand the true

nature of the Fascist and liberal democratic regimes he so

confidently judged.

Discussion of Pound’s political loyalties has always

operated within the horizons of the assumption that culture

heroes cannot be wrong about cultural and political matters

without losing their status as culture heroes.    No scholar is

willing to claim that Pound’s support for Mussolini and the Axis

was wise or even tolerable, and therefore it has been necessary

either to deny the plain facts or to isolate his politics as a

consequence of his economic errors, that is, his commitment to

the Social Credit theories of Major Douglas.    Unfortunately

neither of these arguments quite fits the facts as they are now

available to us.    Thanks to the work of Niccolo Zapponi, we

have good information about Pound’s relationship with Mussolini

and Italian Fascism.    It was a very close and friendly

relationship.    Pound’s loyalty to the Mussolini regime cannot

be denied.    The role of economic theory in the story has been

much discussed, with claims being made both for its crucial role,

and for its irrelevance.    And, of course, it has been claimed

that Modernists in general, and Pound in particular, were

attracted to authoritarian, anti-democratic regimes.

There is a element of truth and accuracy in all of these

claims.    However, they suffer from a degree of generality that

makes any assessment of their adequacy quite impossible.    What

I hope to be able to do in the following pages is to bring

forward hard information about what Pound knew and said on these

topics in the crucial years from 1932 to 1939.    The unpublished

correspondence between William Bird, Paris correspondent for the

New York Sun, and Pound is particularly illuminating because they

engaged in a political and economic debate during the years when

Pound's opinions became hardened.      Indeed, it is not too much

to say that Pound’s political publications of the period grow out

of this correspondence.    What we will learn from this

examination is, I think, that Pound stumbled into an extreme

Right-wing political position in the 1930s. However, even though

he stumbled into it, he maintained that position for the rest of

his life.    To say that Pound “stumbled” into it, is not to

excuse him of moral and/or intellectual failure.    What I do

mean to claim is that Pound’s error was his own, and was not an

inevitable consequence of Modernist “ideology” as is often

alleged.

To begin we must make a difficult imaginative leap and allow

that a rational and well-intentioned observer of the

international scene in the inter-war period could see evil in

Britain, in France, and in the United States, and virtue in

Mussolini’s Italy.    If we can achieve such a feat of historical

imagination, then we have put ourselves in a position where it is

at least possible to see Pound's infatuation with Mussolini in

1932 as an error in judgment and not an unspeakable choice of

vice over virtue.    There remains the more intractable issue of

Pound’s persistence in his loyalty to Fascism after the Axis

alliance (Oct. 24, 1936), as Nazi behaviour in Poland, the USSR

and the Ukraine revealed the true nature of Hitler’s regime, not

to speak of revelations of the holocaust in 1945 and thereafter. 

I have no palatable explanations for Pound’s conduct on the

political front after his arraignment for treason.    It seems to

have been a consequence of his stubborn arrogance, coupled with

an intellectual failure that I hope to illuminate in the

following discussion.

It is tempting to suppose that Pound’s move to Rapallo from

Paris in 1924 was inspired by Mussolini’s installation as premier

two years previously (October of 1922).    But Pound’s own

testimony belies such an interpretation: “Life was interesting in

Paris from 1921 to 1924, nobody bothered much about Italy.   

Some details I never heard of at all until I saw the Esposizione del

Decennio [of 1932]” (, 51).    Pound may be indulging in a little

rhetorical licence here, for he is attempting to persuade an

American audience that Mussolini has some of the right answers to

current problems (in particular the Great Depression), but his

account is probably accurate enough.    The earliest reference to

Mussolini I have found is in a Nov. 30 letter of 1926 to Harriet

Monroe where he says he thinks “extremely well of Mussolini”

(Paige, 279).    Since Mussolini had recently declared himself

life dictator, we must assume that Pound was not distressed by

Mussolini's departure from democratic principles of government.

We know that Pound began seeking an audience with Mussolini

on April 23, 1932, and that he persisted until he was actually

received on January 30, 1933 (Zapponi, 48-9).    According to

Pound’s own testimony in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, he wrote that

essay mostly in February of 1933.    In other words, Pound’s

Fascism would seem to date from that April 1932 audience.   

Certainly his attitudes, as reflected in the correspondence,

alter dramatically after the audience.    Pound presented

Mussolini with a series of eight economic points and a copy of

the Cantos.    He was so impressed with Mussolini's non-committal

remark after a quick glance at the poem (“But this is amusing!”)

that he wrote it into canto 41:

‘Ma questo,’

said the Boss, ‘è divertente.’

catching the point before the aesthetes had got

there;

(XLI, 202)

He did not have so much luck with the eight points.44    It is

difficult to resist the conclusion that Pound was simply

flattered out of his senses by this man who, it must be conceded,

had charmed an entire nation.55

Indeed, if we read Jefferson and/or Mussolini suspending our shock

and incredulity at its bizarre distortions of history, it is not

difficult to recognize that it is precisely as a wise and

benevolent tyrant that Pound presents Mussolini.    He compares

him to Lenin and Jefferson.    He claims – completely implausibly

– that Jefferson actually ruled the United States for 24 years:

“eight years as President and the sixteen wherein he governed

more or less through deputies, Madison and Monroe” or 48 if you

count Van Buren's presidency and discount John Quincy Adams (J/M,

14-15).    He also claims (with some degree of accuracy) that

Jefferson “governed with a limited suffrage and by means of

conversation with his more intelligent friends” (J/M, 15).   

Such desperate efforts to make Mussolini's self-declared

dictatorship palatable are good evidence of Pound's commitment to

a great man theory of history – if the Cantos themselves do not

offer sufficient evidence of such a bent.    He also lists

Mussolini's achievements – a short list that he repeats in dozens

of places – and contrasts them to the failures of leadership in

contemporary Britain, France, and America.    It is worth noting

that Hitler, who had just become Chancellor of Germany (Jan. 30,

1933), is also spoken of disparagingly (127).    In 1933 it was

Mussolini, not the general Right Wing movement of Fascism/Nazism

that Pound endorses.

One way of reading Jefferson and/or Mussolini is to ask oneself how

Pound could have been so deceived as to suppose that the clownish

and boorish Mussolini was a man of genius.    Certainly the book

does no credit to Pound's reputation as a judge of talent.     

He clearly decided that Mussolini was his hero, his modern

Malatesta or Odysseus, heroes already ensconced in the Cantos.   

Mussolini is placed alongside, Jefferson as a founder of a

nation.    I see no way of avoiding the conclusion that in

matters of practical government Pound was a dupe, and that, at

least in this instance, he was a very poor judge of character.66 

A Times of London editorial on the strong showing of the Nazis in

the German election of 1930 might, however, help to keep things

in some historical perspective:

The Nazis have scored their overwhelming success because

they have appealed to something more fundamental and more

respectable.      Like the Italian Fascists they stand for

some national ideal, however nebulous and extravagantly

expressed, to which personal and class interests shall be

subordinate. (Cited by Meyers, 191)

Even such a perceptive anti-fascist as Jean Paul Sartre reports

that he “studied Husserl and Heidegger in Berlin when Hitler was

already in power, and until the Munich Agreement was hardly aware

of what Nazi rule meant” (cited by Meyers, 192).    In the light

of comments such as these, Pound’s foolishness in 1933 is not so

striking as it seems at first.

Another way of reading Jefferson and/or Mussolini is to see that

there is almost nothing in it that we would normally identify as

Fascist.    There is no mention of racism, no legitimation of

violence – either of political assassination or military

adventures – and no talk of grandeur.    Even anti-Communism, the

stock in trade of all European varieties of Fascism at the time,

is not invoked.    Instead Pound praises Lenin, and claims only a

superiority of Fascist over Communist revolution for the rather

whimsical reason – but one very true to Mussolini’s style – that

“it is not a revolution according to preconceived type” (J/M,

24).    Viewed dispassionately, Jefferson and/or Mussolini is a

rather silly book arguing for a primitive political system in

which one places complete faith in some worthy leader.    If one

reads it alongside some competent professional histories it is

evident that Pound is a babe in the woods, praising innocuous but

misguided policies such as Mussolini’s drive to increase the

Italian population (J/M, 71-3; cf Parker, Europe, 161) as well as

denying the facts of Fascist state censorship of the press.

There is no question, however, but that Jefferson and or Mussolini

represents Pound's true political beliefs.    The Cantos attest

very thoroughly to this fact.    Pound’s epic is in important

respects a poem canonizing authoritarian leaders – beginning with

Sigismondo Malatesta, and ending with a motley collection of

semi-mythical and obscure characters such as Abd-el-Melik and the

San-ku.    (The Malatesta section, we should note, was composed

in 1922-3 before Mussolini had made any impression on Pound.)   

But Pound’s political posture is not specifically    Fascist.   

In 1933 Pound was Douglasite in economics,77 Modernist in

aesthetics, and Platonic in politics.    The last epithet is

somewhat honorific but not inaccurate, even though Pound never

appeals to the Republic to support his views, so far as I know.   

Pound certainly imagined himself to be endorsing a political

authoritarianism with a long and illustrious history in the

Mediterranean world.    This attitude toward political tyranny

was not newly acquired in 1933 or even 1922.    It is a view he

had expressed as early as “Mauberly”:

All men, in law, are equals.

Free of Pisistratus,

We choose a knave or an eunuch

To rule over us.

However to admit that Pound was himself anti-democratic and

elitist in his views is not to admit that he was, in 1933,

Fascist in any standard sense.    It is true that he became a

Fascist in the narrow (and most damaging) sense that he was a

Mussolini loyalist and supporter of Italy and the Axis in the

war, and it is true that Fascism is an anti-democratic and

elitist ideology.    But Pound was anti-democratic and elitist

before Mussolini or Hitler or Franco or Oswald Mosley had

appeared on the scene.    Indeed, his political education in

London had been in the company of anti-democratic elitists such

as William Butler Yeats, A. R. Orage, T. E. Hulme, Major Douglas

and Wyndham Lewis.    Of these men Yeats and Orage lived long

enough to face the Fascist temptation, but did not live to meet

the ultimate test of loyalty in the face of war.   

As has been well documented, Yeats was drawn to the violence

of Fascism.    Orage was not.    Pound followed Orage into Social

Credit, but they parted company on Fascism.    Douglas, Lewis and

Pound all lived long enough to face the severe test of loyalties

that the World War II set.    Both Englishmen remained loyal to

their country, despite the fact that both had more points of

agreement with the Fascists than Pound had – especially on the

question of race.    Clearly one could be a radical conservative

like Orage – and even add to that anti-Semitism (as was the case

with Douglas) – and still not make common cause with Italy and

Germany.    Orage and Douglas both remained loyal to their native

land and to legal and democratic means of political action,

despite their elitism and Douglas’ racism.

We will examine Lewis’s case in some detail.    As for

Douglas, his anti-semitism is clear in his writings of the

thirties, but he was not attracted to Fascism (see A Light from

Eleusis 81-2).    Pound complains to Gerhart Münch (in a letter of

Nov. 11, 1939):

          C. H. Douglas is steaming away on six cylinders

every week damning jews.    BUT he knows nothing of Italy. 

I have hammered fascism at him for years.    If there were

more German EDUCATION, if instead of Russian propaganda we

had had more EDUCATION, a man like Doug/ wouldn't be going

on as if the Nazi land tenure didn't exist.

              All this inalienable minimum holdings,

indivisible etc. ought to have been advertised.

              The Social Crediter IS explaining in words of

one syllable HOW the Jew got his power, and how he goes on

gettin it.

              What we need FROM Germany is clear text books

written on one text of Mein Kampf/ namely the passage on

LEIHKAPITAL [“loan capital”]. (Beinecke Za Pound F.1195)

It is obvious from this letter to the young German composer (and

anti-Semite) – written    after the outbreak of war – where

Pound’s loyalties lay, and where he stood on the Jewish question.

The position he adopts in 1939 is very different in character

from the pro-Fascism expressed six years earlier in Jefferson and/or

Mussolini.    The world was also very different.    Sides had been

clearly drawn n 1939. Pound    chose Mussolini and Italy, and

took Hitler, Hirohito, and racism with the package.

Pound’s movement from an understandable, if rather foolish,

admiration for Mussolini in 1933 to a full endorsement by 1939 of

the international gangsterism and racism of the Nazis is very

difficult to reconcile with a picture of Pound as a decent and

intelligent human being.    That he was drawn to Fascism in the

relatively benign form of Mussolini’s Italian regime rather than

in the much more malign Hitlerian variety is somewhat mitigating.

After all, until the invasion of Ethiopia in 1934, Italy remained

an ally of Britain and France and an opponent of both Germany and

the USSR.    It was not until October of 1936 that the Axis

alliance was formed.    We should also remember that Spain was

ruled by the military dictator Primo de Rivera, from 1923 to

1930, and that Poland was ruled by another military dictator,

Józef Pilsudski (1926-35).    No one has been denounced for

tolerating those regimes (Parker, passim).

Mussolini was different than either de Rivera or Pilsudski

in that he professed to represent an ideological alternative to

liberal democracy on the one hand, and Communism on the other.   

We now know that his claim was largely a sham, but it did not

seem so to many sensible people at the time.    It was not really

until the Spanish Civil War (which began in July of 1937) that

the national rivalries of France, Britain, Germany, the USSR, and

Italy began to be perceived as an ideological conflict between

Fascist totalitarian dictatorships and Communist egalitarian

revolution in the case of the Spanish Civil War, the democracies

shamefully stood on the sidelines.    After 1939, however, the

conflict was characterized as a struggle between Fascist

dictatorship and liberal democracy.    The USSR was then allied

with the Fascists (Parker, passim).    It was only Hitler’s

invasion of the USSR that brought the USSR into the war.    To

represent Joseph Stalin as a defender of democracy and liberty as

some current Marxists would have us do is surely as great a

grotesquerie as it was to represent Mussolini as the defender of

civilization.    The political landscape of the thirties was so

torn and twisted as to deceive more astute observers than Pound.

That Pound was drawn to dictatorship on long held

ideological principles which are also embedded in the Cantos is,

I think, undeniable.    On this point I agree with Michael

Bernstein's insistence that the Cantos reflect and express Pound's

political loyalties (114-19), and I made much the same point in

my own study of the Cantos (A Light from Eleusis, 178).    My claim

here is that his commitment to the Axis powers – as opposed to

his attraction to plausible tyrants – was initially an historical

accident consequent upon his residence in Italy.    He chose

Mussolini, and accepted the Axis and Hitler out of a sense of

personal loyalty to Mussolini, supported by a grotesquely

erroneous analysis of current events.    There is no question of

the    persistence of that error as is clear from a letter to

Louis Dudek of January 1953:

leave MUS [Mussolini] as Mus/ conditioned by circs/

Nobody who opposed the shits is likely to be crucified/ the

catholics now ROT because they abandon the ONE myth of their

"religion"

corruptive process been going on for centuries

. . . . . . . . . . . .    . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . .

the final filth is E. W. Morrow <probably E. R. Morrow,

American journalist>, blasting of "totalitarian" fascist or

bolshoi/    OMITTING the fact that his pewk and Roosevelt

brought in the goddam savages.    It was Oooze and Winston,

who betrayed civilization . Not Mus/ Moscow Ally

(of course they make no distinction between Mus and Hit

[Hitler].)

another squalor.88    (Dudek, 95)

There is no question that Pound was wildly wrong in his estimate

of where the preponderance of virtue lay in the conflict of 1939

to 1945, as he was wrong about the politics of the post war

period.    And there is no doubt that his error led him to

associate with pretty objectionable people.    The only thing

open to question is whether this error was an inevitable

consequence of his general beliefs and attitudes, or a personal

error.    In short, was Pound really an evil man, or just a

foolish – even a stupid one, so far as politics are concerned.

Just because Modernism, despite all its talk of objectivity

and textual autonomy, has remained fully committed to the genius

theory of artistic creation, it has not been possible to mount a

defence of Pound's behaviour on grounds of stupidity without a

drastic devaluation of everything else he did.    And because of

his pivotal position in the history of literary modernism in

English – as the theorist of Imagism, “discoverer” of Joyce,

editor of The Waste Land, and a continuing source of poetic

inspiration to subsequent generations of poets – it has not been

possible simply to expunge Pound from literary history.   

Instead, literally dozens of books or chapters of books have been

devoted to the piecemeal expulsion of Pound from his allegedly

important role in any of the literary moments listed above

despite good evidence to the contrary.    If, however, we abandon

the naïve notion that an important poet must be a genius, then we

have available the explanation that Pound was simply stupid and

arrogant on political matters.    Such an explanation is not a

“defence” in the sense that it implies that we ought to excuse

him from the consequences of his errors.   

It might well be asked how we can isolate political

stupidity from the poetry.    If we remain within the Romantic

and Modernist assumption that a work of art, or even an author's

entire oeuvre, is a single, organic whole, and that any

imperfection in its message is like a toxin or cancer inevitably

infecting the entire organism, no such isolation is possible.   

Such a Romantic presumption is resisted by Marjorie Perloff in

her response to those assessing Modernism itself as Fascist –

that is, violent, racist, and authoritarian.    The “case” of

Pound is instructive because he was indubitably Modernist, and

(also indubitably) became a defender and even proponent of

violence, racism, and authoritarianism.    He has always been an

irritant galling the tender parts of the theory of aesthetic

autonomy.    Perhaps the poet can be saved at the sacrifice of

the theory.

Pound's “case” has been especially difficult because he

actively involved himself in what appeared to be “offering aid

and comfort to the enemy,” leading to his indictment for treason.

In addition, he never admitted – or presumably even recognized –

that he had chosen the wrong side.    But even if Pound had

reverted to American loyalties – or if he had just kept prudently

silent – after the invasion of Poland, or after Pearl Harbour, he

still would have behaved very differently than his friend and

fellow vorticist, Wyndham Lewis.    On the outbreak of war Lewis 

abandoned his earlier support for Hitler and threw in his lot

with his own people.    Pound, by contrast, remained in Italy and

behaved in every respect like an Italian patriot to the bitter

end.

Lewis and Pound had been allies in the cultural wars of the

pre-war and early post-war years beginning with Blast, the

satirical review of 1914 and continuing virtually to Lewis's

death in 1957.    But they were also long time    antagonists.   

Lewis attacked both Pound and Joyce as “time philosophers” in his

1927 monograph, Time and Western Man, and seemed to regard Pound as

an amiable fool on political matters: “Pound is not a vulgar

humbug even in those purely propagandist activities, where, to my

mind, he certainly handles humbug, but quite innocently, I

believe.    Pound is – that is my belief – a genuine naïf.    He

is a sort of revolutionary simpleton” (Time and Western Man, 38).

Lewis's assessment has, I think, been borne out by events.

It is instructive to compare Lewis’s 1931 monograph, Hitler,

with Pound’s Jefferson and/or Mussolini written a couple of years

later.99    Lewis is clearly a much more competent observer of

the political scene than is Pound.    But what is striking about

Lewis’s book is that he is willing to endorse the violence and

racism of the Nazis, whereas Pound entirely avoided Mussolin’'s

violent tactics – and did not have to face the question of racism

because it was not part of Mussolini’s ideology until forced upon

him by Hitler in 1938 (See Michaelis, 117-52).    As we have

seen, Pound focussed primarily on the totalitarian and

dictatorial nature of Mussolini’s regime, arguing for the

benevolence, efficiency, and intelligence of such a political

system as compared to corrupt liberal, capitalist democracies.   

Such a posture was well within the range of ideological tolerance

of the day.

Lewis’ Hitler is much closer to the borders of tolerance,

even of 1931.    It was written when Hitler was no more than the

leader of a political party that had recently risen to official

opposition in the German Reichstag.    However, Mein Kampf and

many political speeches by Hitler and Göring made the Nazi’s

position on racism and German expansion perfectly clear, and the

bully-boy behaviour of Himmler’s SA (Sturmabteilung) or

“Brownshirts” left no doubt about Nazi approval of political

violence.    The attitudes that Lewis strikes in Hitler are much

closer to those expressed by Pound during the nineteen fifties,

than to those of Jefferson and/or Mussolini.

Like Pound – and despite his remark in Time and Western Man

cited above – Lewis seems to have been persuaded by Douglas’s

analysis of the economic situation in the thirties, and expressed

it very clearly.    His retraction of his 1931 endorsement in The

Hitler Cult (1939) – somewhat disingenuously – explains his error as

having arisen from his approval of the economic policies of the

Nazis:

I was, above all, glad the stupid French chauvinists were

about to have their noses rubbed in their handiwork.    And

the views on finance of Herr Feder1010 were not without a

certain appeal – they reminded me of our Major

Douglas . . ..    The idea of a “credit crank” being let

loose in the second greatest industrial country in the world

recommended itself to me.    That would brighten things up! 

I thought Europe had asked for that, too. (26-7)1111

We cannot take this retraction at face value.    Lewis

endorsed much more of the Naz’'s program than just Feder's

economic policies.    Nonetheless, the retraction is illuminating

in its rendering of the ideological and political mood of the

early thirties when not just Douglas and Pound, but also many

reasonable people thought – just at the beginning of the misery

of the Great Depression – that something was radically wrong with

Liberal Democracy and Capitalism:

Now, in the light of the beliefs I have been exposing, this

“misery” is purely and absolutely artificial.    It is the

result not of an actual, a natural, want [that is, shortage

of goods and services], but of an artificially-fostered,

sedulously-contrived want.    Obviously there is no real

want: there is an enormous abundance of everything, if men’s

technical power to produce were made use of and put at the

disposal of all.      But for some reason or other we have

slowly been conducted into such a state of affairs that, in

the Lap of Plenty, we have agreed to starve.    And the

“Science” of Economics, as usually practised, does certainly

seem to be there merely in order to confuse us, and to throw

dust in our eyes.    (Hitler, 186)

Lewis’s perception that the Depression was entirely avoidable and

easily curable, implies that some group must wish it to continue.

This logic is the one Pound and Douglas applied, and it was also

part of the anti-capitalist rhetoric of Mussolini, Hitler, and

Oswald Mosley.    On this point, Chace’s argument that it was

radicalism itself that drew the Modernists to Fascism is sound. 

But there is also in Lewis a strong “conservative” motive, a

desire, that is, to preserve and maintain the values and mores

that he and Pound thought to be the core of civilization.    That

seems to have been Lewis’ strongest motive in 1931.    He saw

Hitler and the Nazis as a bulwark against Marxism – which, it

must be admitted, is the way the Fascists represented themselves.

Hitler essentially supports the Nazis as the lesser of the two

evils.    Unlike Pound in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, Lewis saw Marxism

as a much greater threat to Western civilization than Fascist

totalitarianism, or even Nazi racism.    He also seems to endorse

the Nazi conspiracy theory of history in which the cunning Jews

are seen to be    orchestrating the destruction of Europe:

It is a subject of constant speculation how the Roman Empire

came to collapse . . ..    There is no mystery at all – it

is an “open conspiracy” – about the Fall of Europe.    In a

word, it is the result, in the first instance, of an

enormous new factor -- machinery and industrial technique. 

In the short space of a century science turned our world

upside-down. Secondly, the world being upside down and

inside-out, the shrewd parasite (existing in all times and

places) psychologically an outcast as regards our settled

structure, took advantage of this disorder and consequent

bafflement to sting us all to death. (Hitler, 73)

While this statement avoids naming the "shrewd parasites," no one

could mistake them in context for any but the Jews.

Lewis defends Hitler's racism, but he balks at the Aryan

theory, and adds the qualification that anti-semitism is not

suitable for the British (Hitler, 35-43).    However, he returns

to the questions of race later in the book and concludes that

racism is a useful anti-body to protect Europe from infection

with Marxist class conflict:

The “Class”-doctrinaire has no greater enemy than Race.

And it is natural therefore that he should seek every

opportunity of belittling Race.    It is also natural

that the Nationalsocialist, persuaded that the “Class-

war” propaganda is one of the main factors in the

present disintegration – for it sets friend against

friend – should insist upon Race – and he has done that

to some purpose (Hitler, 84).

The “Class-doctrinaire,” of course, is the Communist.

Lewis’ book on Hitler, then, is much more objectionable,

from either a liberal or a Marxist perspective, that Pound’s book

on Mussolini, but it also far less naïve and foolish than

Pound’s.      He is always a better informed and more cogent

political observer than is Pound.    Hitler also closer to the

main-stream reading of political events of the day than Jefferson

and/or Mussolini, one that pretty well accepted the scenario painted

by the Germans and exploited by the Nazis.    That scenario could

be described as follows: The cause of instability in Europe

between the wars was France – because of its vindictive attitude

toward the Germany.    The principal threat to European security

was Communism with its doctrines of class conflict and

internationalism.    The best defence against the Communists were

nationalist loyalties.    The Peace of Versailles had only paid

lip service to national “self-determination,” isolating many

German speakers in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Austria.    The

injustice of Versailles was the principal destabilizing factor in

Europe. And so on and so forth.

It is striking that none of this German Realpolitik is

reflected in Jefferson and/or Mussolini.    Of course sch a pro-German

reading of the consequences of the Peace was not the view adopted

in Italy.    But more importantly, Pound seems interested in

endorsing Mussolini as a great leader almost independently of any

policies he might wish to pursue.    He makes no references to

the details of European national rivalries and grievances, nor

does he invoke the Communist threat.    His whole focus is on

Mussolini as a remarkable man like Jefferson, John Adams, and

Lenin.    His message is that neither ideology nor institutions

matter.    All that matters is the quality of those who govern:

Jefferson thought the formal features of the American system

would work, and they did work till the time of General Grant

but the condition of their working was that inside them

there should be a de facto government composed of sincere men

willing the national good.    When the men of understanding,

and then the nucleus of the national mind hasn’t the moral

force to translate knowledge into action. I don’t believe it matters

a damn what legal forms or what administrative forms there are in a

government. (J/M, 94-5.    My emphasis)

This point is driven home again and again in the Cantos –

particularly the Chinese section.    It is, of course, a

profoundly anti-democratic and extremely foolish political

doctrine.    It is also the doctrine that Mussolini preached.   

It amounts to a complete abandonment of any institutional model

of government in favour of a purely personal one.    Nonetheless,

Pound is guilty here of political naïveté, of poor judgement,

even of stupidity, but there is no clear-cut moral failure, as it

seems to me there is in Lewis’ Hitler.    To believe that the best

government is a benevolent tyranny is not to believe that

oppression, violence, and racism should be tolerated or

encouraged, but it is spectacularly naïve.

Lewis, by contrast, is much less protected by political

blindness.    In Hitler he directly addresses the violence and

racism of the Nazis, and in full consciousness of those aspects

of Nazism still decides that we should support Hitler as the

saviour of Europe:

   

It would be a great mistake to regard him [Hitler] as merely

just another “dictator”: for he is a very different person

to Mussolini, Pilsudski, or Primo de Rivera and we must

expect very different behaviour to ensue upon his accession

to power . . .. (Hitler, 51)

On this point history has proved Lewis correct, but not in the

way he expected.

Pound's backing of Mussolini in 1933 was a mistake that

“anyone could have made,” and many did.    It was an error that

on the face of it appears far less damaging than Lewis’s backing

of Hitler.    However, Lewis backed off from Hitler and Germany

in 1939, but Pound clung to Mussolini and Italy.    In The Hitler

Cult of 1939 Lewis’ retraction of his suport for Hitler, he

describes Hitler as Gothic, German, Romantic, and of weak

intellect.    (Rather oddly, but very Lewisly, he associates

Yeats, Synge, and Joyce with Hitler's romanticism about the folk

on page    52.)    In short, Lewis now finds Hitler to be rather

vulgar, as opposed a more or less necessary evil counterpoise to

both Communism and the “financiers.”

It seems that Lewis’ loyalty to the social and political

values of the Western democracies was stronger than his elitism

and mild anti-Semitism, and even than his commitment to the

cultural values he thought were threatened by the levelling and

internationalist tendencies of socialism and communism.    Pound

had no such national loyalty to protect him.    He had long since

turned his back on his native land, and more recently on England.

His move South from London to Paris, and finally to Rapallo

turned out, after all, to be a political and spiritual journey as

well as a physical and economic one.    Pound himself was already

so describing it in 1933:

London was in terror of thought.. Nothing was being buried. 

Paris was tired, very tired, but they wanted table rase,

they wanted the dead things cleared out even if there were

nothing to replace them.

Italy was, on the other hand, full of bounce.    I said all

of this to a Lombard writer.    I said: London is dead,

Paris is tired, but here the place is alive. (J/M, 49)1212

As an expatriate – unlike Lewis and Douglas –    Pound's

loyalty was not to a nation, a political system, or even a

people, but to an abstract cultural ideal that he could scarcely

articulate, but which he laboured to embody in the Cantos.    He

had long imagined himself to have an unerring capacity to

recognize the genuine and the fine, and to distinguish it from

the phony and kitsch.    The habit of defending himself and other

artists – in particular Eliot, Lewis, and Joyce – against the

uncomprehending assaults of the philistine public doubtless

contributed to Pound’s imperviousness to criticism of Mussolini. 

The truth of the matter seems to be that Pound attached his

chariot to Mussolini’s star, and never did unhitch himself – even

in the face of the brutalities of Italy’s Nazi allies and

Mussolini's own brutalities in Ethiopia and at home.

Pound’s Fascism thus, has a complex provenance.    Like many

others he found Mussolini’s authoritarian and non-ideological

Fascism initially attractive as a specific against both the

venality and ineffectuality of liberal, capitalist democracies

and the the threat of Communist cultural levelling.   

Furthermore, Mussolini – unlike all the other political figures

Pound and Douglas had approached – actually conceded to meet

Pound and listen to his solutions.1313    From his interview with

Mussolini on, Pound seems to have regarded himself as the court

poet of the Fascist revolution.    For example, when the League

of Nations imposed partial sanctions on Italy after Mussolini’s

invasion of Ethiopia (October 3, 1935), Pound wrote to

Chiavolini, Mussolini’s secretary, with a preposterous scheme for

a New Italian-led League of Nations as a way around the sanctions

(Zapponi, 50).    Again, after Mussolini and Hitler began to

support Franco in Spain, Pound wrote to Chiavolini again,

suggesting that Douglasite economic policies be applied

immediately in Spain (Zapponi, 51).    In December of 1936, Pound

wrote directly to Mussolini suggesting that he adopt Gesell's

notion of Stamp Scrip instead of taxation.    He received no

response to any of these initiatives.

Pound’s imperviousness to criticism of Mussolini, and to his

failure to take Pound’s    advice or to follow Douglasite

economic policies is evident from an early date.    While writing

Jefferson and/or Mussolini he was in correspondence with    his old

Paris friend, William Bird, owner of Three Mountains Press and the   

publisher of A Draft of Sixteen Cantos (1925).    Bird’s publishing

venture was relatively short-lived.    He was employed as the

Paris correspondent for the Consolidated Press Association and

the New York Sun.    As a journalist he was well informed on

political matters and happens to have been quite radical in his

economic views as well.    The unidentified “correspondent’s”

comments on Mercanti di Cannoni that Pound cites approvingly at the

beginning of chapter XXIII of Jefferson and/or Mussolini is Bird.1414   

Bird’s letter deplores the deflationary policies pursued by all

the national governments of the day and argues that those

policies contribute to the severity of the Depression.     

However, Pound complains that in the next letter his

correspondent “falls flop into catalogued fallacy, possibly from

haste, confusion of office work, etc.” (J/M, 87-8).    That “next

letter” was a very long one.    It is worth citing at some length

for it demonstrates how impervious Pound was to critical analysis

even as early as late 1932 and early 1933:

Don't go high-hatting me about Economics.    I was a

Technocrat way back in 1919 (before they had found that

stylish name for it.)    Somewhere in my archives is a

copy of H. Scott's first manifesto, which was typed in

about a dozen copies, none of which ever got into a

printer's hands, so far as I know.    It was Mont

Schuyler (you remember him?) who introduced me into

those underground milieux.    Delegates came from the

I.W.W., [the left leaning International Workers of

World union] the Pennsylvania mining unions, etc., to

hear the new gospel, preached in the catacombs of

Greenwich Village.    . . . . . . .

    A committee was formed at the request of Tammany

to advise that forward-looking body how the revolution

might be accomplished by peaceful means.    A session

was held at the home of Nina Wilcox Putnam which

generated more heat than light.    Most of the reddest

labor leaders including a couple of Roosians finally

thought that the most the Legislature could do would be

to increase the income tax.    Somebody said it should

simply mean that big NY corporations would move to N.

Jersey.    It may surprise you, mon cher Ezra, but it

was yr [sic] present correspondent who put the

discussion to bed with the proposition that since the

State exists for the protection of privilege, it could

hardly function in the direction of the suppression of

the same.    An opinion which the same correspt.

respectfully maintains to-day.

Subsequently we retired to a nearby coffee-house – some of

us – to see if better progress could be made in a smaller

and less formal committee. The conclusion was that a non-

violent revolution was impossible, but that the State, if it

really feared that a violent one was inevitable, might do

much to render it less destructive of real values. 

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

.

That the existing system based on prices is doomed to

collapse is easily demonstrated, and in fact Scott had then

(1919) worked out a chart which indicated that the collapse

would come inevitably within 15 years.    That would be 1934

at the outside limit.    But I understand he has somewhat

modified this conclusion because of the fact that he did not

then take into consideration sufficiently that the war had

provoked a temporary speeding-up of the rhythm of economic

phenomena, and that peace would slow down the process. It is

also impossible to calculate the resiliency or elasticity of

the price system.    Things have been done and are being

done to maintain it (or the appearance of it) which a priori

might have been considered impossible.    England for ten

years has supported an average of 2,000,000 idle men out of

state funds.    America is creating fantastic “credits”

based on nothing more substantial than carbon monoxide gas,

and until some little boy with a very piercing voice shouts

“But the King hasn't got any pants on!” there is no reason

why this kind of juggling shouldn't continue for some time.

On the other hand the notion that America is in no danger of

revolution because we haven't many registered members of the

Socialist Party is twaddle.    I expect any day to see on

the front page of the NY Herald that a mob of 4,000

unemployed have walked into the city hall at Cleveland Ohio

and sat down in the mayor's chair.    The next day the same

thing will happen in Denver, Atlanta, and Bangor, Me. State

Militia called to deal with the situation will fraternize

instead.    And then what? Hmmm.1515

Pound's comment on this fall “into catalogued fallacy” is

just about as obscure with the letter in hand as it was for

readers of Jefferson and/or Mussolini, who could not have had any idea

of the content of Bird's letter: “From a discussion of effects

which of necessity follow certain causes he falls into a

description of what has been, without apparently perceiving the

difference in the nature of the two cases” (J/M, 88).    Pound's

cryptic style is much admired in the Cantos, but it does not

contribute to comprehensibility.    In his political and economic

writing it serves to obscure his ignorance and lacunae in his

arguments.

When Bird asked for the second time (in a letter of Feb. 22,

1934) if Mussolini was taking any of Pound’s advice – in

particular the eight points Pound had left with him at the

January 1933 audience, Pound admitted:

YES, the boss [Mussolini] did answer my questions under

the terms they were asked.    Namely that AS my

questions would undoubtedly have blown hell out of

Europe and precipitated no end of a hell of a perfectly

useless rumpus, I was not asking them in the hope of

making a mere disturbance, and that they were there to

be mentioned pubkly IF and when USEFUL.1616

In short, Mussolini did not respond to Pound’s questions, but put

him off with a flattering assessment of the importance of the

questions.   

In this same letter of February 24, 1934, Pound continues to

berate Bird in a very abusive and intemperate manner not at all

characteristic of their earlier correspondence.    His political

position is already much hardened from that of only a year

earlier, and his temper much shorter:

For all our time/ the sonsofbitches have maintained a

nightmare which is now as god damn idiotic as having people

die of thirst in the attic, because some syphilitic kid has

turned off the water in the basement.

[On the same page he excoriates the Communists:] And the

communists are more god damn stupid than any one and all

revolution and all etc/etc/ comes from the tiresome college

grad/ class/ wot wuz called the lawyer an purrfesshinal

class/ the stewd/dent class/ like you and me and Lenin and

the big Bull Mooseolini.

In response Bird pointed out Pound’s willingness to approve

of whatever Mussolini did or said, and to condemn whatever was

said or done in the democracies:

Question, to be passed on to Rome or anywhere:    What

difference would it make if Keynes DID admit publicly that

he was a shit?

What difference would it make if FDR <Franklin Delano

Roosevelt> had brains?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . .

Italy you say elsewhere is the one country in the world that

you yourself couldn't govern better than it's governed.   

Cf. Naples slums, Fiat, tsk tsk.    What new light has Italy

brought on the economic problem? B.M. [Benito Mussolini] has

more power and plenty more intelligence than Frank [Franklin

Delano Roosevelt]    The results are meagre.    It must be

supposed that the causes are beyond his control."

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . .

Explain to me why BM hasn't instituted the National Dividend

and Stamp Script and I will then tell you why I think it's a

waste of time to fuss with the idea.

You focus all your attention on the countries that are least

likely to yield anything –    England, France, U.S.   

Countries that you confess are in the grip of scoundrels and

imbeciles, and wouldn’t do what was right if they knew, and

couldn't know because they haven't the brains.

While right under your feet is a country ruled by one man,

wise and honest, and you simply say the country is so well

run that you have no suggestions to make.1717

Pound's response to this sarcastic letter was not

intemperate, and despite Bird's challenges to    Pound’s

admiration for Mussolini they continued to correspond right up to

the outbreak of the war.      Pound wearied of the debate before

Bird, and tried to conclude it with a typical brush off early in

1935 (April 2):

ALL yr/ damn points have been treated; mostly a dozen times

over.

The difficulty of getting it down ONCE as near foolproof as

possible/ precludes (ef thets the woid) letch to rush it

into partial xxxpression in private correspondence with semi

persiflagical N.A.N.A.1818

As he often does, Pound is obviously trying to fudge here.    It

seems clear to me that he does not himself fully understand the

economic and monetary matters he so vigorously accuses others of

misunderstanding.    His irritation is that of the novice whose

hard-bought lessons are contradicted by a senior student.

    Bird gives up neither his assault on Mussolini nor the

debate on economic theory.    On May 2 he wrote in response to

Pound's first radio speech over short wave radio (and,

interestingly, claims credit for initiating the idea of short

wave broadcasts from Rome to the United States):

I heard you made a radio speech to the US in January about

the economic triumphs of fascismo.    Little did you know

probably that you were indebted to me for the opportunity,

i.e., it was I, in August, who persuaded the It. Govt. to

present these programs to American short-wave listeners.   

I should be extremely curious to know where the economic

superiority of the fascist system lies, as when I was in

Rome I sought in vain for any indications of it. As for

monetary policy . . . I forbear to proceed.    It seems

quite apparent that FDR has gone further along the right

road in 2 yrs that the other chap [Mussolin] in 13, and

under constitutional and legal handicaps that the other one

doesn't have to contend with.    (Beinecke, Za Pound, Folder

Bef-Bk 1935-58)

This letter also offers advice, analysis and criticism on the

topics of economic theory and practice.    Just five days later

Pound received another troublesome letter from Bird, this time

criticizing Mussolini more directly and roundly than before:

Please understand that I don’t yield even to you in my

admiration for the boss.    He knows exactly what he wants

to do and is doing it.    Unfortunately he is doing (because

he wants to) precisely what all the ignorant bastids and

sons of bitches are doing in other countries, out of sheer

ignorance and cussedness.    If it had happened that the

boss really wanted to better the economic condition of the

country, there is no doubt whatever that he could have done

it, as I can't see where the obstruction would come from.   

It just happens that for reasons best known to himself he

doesn't want to.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . .

What discourages me in my correspondence with you is not my

own ignorance, which God knows is sufficient, but your bland

assumption that smokescreens are still useful, now that

infrared photography has been invented.    Off with the

false whiskers!

I’m sorry I haven’t read ALL your writings on economics,

it’s just been my bad luck that all I have happened to see

raised more questions than they answered, & when I apply to

the author for elucidation he takes two pages to tell me why

he hasn't got time to write me a telegram.    (Lilly, Bird

Coll., Folder 1931-39)

There are several more letters from Bird in this vein.

Clearly Pound had ample opportunity to assess the economic

policies of Mussolini between 1933 and the outbreak of the war. 

He had a radical friend to help him see that Mussolini was not,

in fact, following those economic policies that Pound so ardently

recommended.    This friend even pointed out to him (correctly)

that Roosevelt's New Deal was closer to Douglasite theories than

anything Mussolini had done, and was achieved under the

constraints of a democratic government.    None of this made any

impression on Pound.    He simply accuses Bird of ignorance when

he finally responds in July:

There is no way out save by MONETARY reform.    If you stick

down a hole a<nd> neglect the growing mass of elucidation on

this subject, you are merely part of the god damn ignorance,

which is naturally the ROOT

If the shite and murderers ignore the way out, it takes time

to educate the unconscious obstructors.    You seem to WANT

to maintain your ignorance, despite the falling of the

leaves.

Present system merely geared to create interest bearing

debt.

    and production by farmers is a form of production

in general.1919

This letter taxes Bird's patience enough to elicit a sharp

condemnation of Mussolini which pretty well puts an end to the

discussion, but does not move Pound (August 2, 1935):

Fer gawd's sake, however, comma, don’t tell me that the

reason why Italy doesn’t need Social Credit and National

Dividends is that Mussolini has planted more wheat.   

Suppose I pointed out to you that the US. and France, which

never have had the blessings of Fascist rule, have always

(and still do) maintained a far higher standard of living

than Italy.. Would you say this meant that there was no need

of doing anything about their economic system?    And have

you ever heard any more bosh uttered by any statesman of any

nationality, concerning the currency question, that the Duce

has uttered repeatedly?    What about that stone monument

wherever it is, on which is carved his resolve to maintain

the lira on gold ruat coelum?    Let’s talk sense.

Fact is that nothing has been done in 12 years of fascism to

alter the bases of the capitalist system.    I know it, you

know it, he knows it.    Whether he is INTENDING to do

something is another matter.    But if so the question What

is he waiting for? is still valid.    And you, who are so

impatient with others (who in most cases haven’t the POWER)

ought to be asking it.    (Beienecke, Za Pound, Folder Bef-

Bk 1935-58)

The correspondence with Bird leaves little doubt that

Pound's fascism was little more than a loyalty to Mussolini, a

misguided loyalty, which blinded him to any rational assessment

of the facts.    Where Mussolini went, so went Pound.    One must

suppose that a personal trait of stubborn arrogance contributed

as much to Pound’s political errors as any particular propensity

of Modernist aesthetics toward Fascism or racism.    Pound’s

engagement with economics and politics make it abundantly clear

that he always followed and never led, despite a bumptious style

that made him appear to be in front of a parade.   

Lewis’ shrewd assessment of Pound's personality in Time and

Western Man is probably the best explanation of his political

behaviour, we are likely to get.    Lewis tells us that “the

particular stimulation that Pound requires for what he does all

comes from without; he is terribly dependent upon people and upon

‘atmosphere’ . . .    he is easily isolated, his native resources

nil . . . [and is always] glad to be in the neighbourhood of a

big drum” (41).    For Lewis Pound was not only “a man in love

with the past,” but also an “intellectual eunuch,” and so

susceptible to the ideas of others that Lewis calls him “a little

crowd” (70).

Lewis is a satirist, and tends to hyperbole, but his

assessment seems sound to me.    Made as it was in 1927, it is

free of apologetic motives, and is in fact an attempt to

undermine Pound’s aesthetic influence and reputation.    It

amounts to saying that Pound was an intellectual sponge, taking

up the ideas of others and holding them without any true

assimilation.    Damaging as such an assessment is, it seems to

fit the facts, and is certainly less damaging than an insistence

that Pound fully understood what he was doing as a Mussolini

loyalist.    I prefer to think of him as a fool in politics than

as mad or morally depraved.    And, moreover, I do not believe

that he was either mad or depraved.    He was just a bloody-

minded fool.

List of Works Cited

Bernstein, Michael.    The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern

Verse Epic. Princeton: Princeton UP 1980.

Chace, William M.    The Political Identities of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.   

Stanford: Stanford UP 1973.

Collier, Richard. Duce! The Rise And Fall Of Benito Mussolini.    New

York: Viking Press 1971.

Dudek, Louis, ed. DK/ Some Letters of Ezra Pound. Montreal: DC Books,

1974.

Gallup, Donald.    A Bibliography of Ezra Pound. London: Rupert-Hart-

Davis, 1969.

Harrison, John R.    The Reactionaries. London: Victor Gollanz

Ltd., 1966.

Lewis, Wyndham.    Hitler. [1931] New York: Gordon Press, 1972.

--------------.    The Hitler Cult. [1939] New York: Gordon Press,

1972.

--------------.    Time and Western Man. [1927] Boston: Beacon

Press, 1957.

Materer, Timothy, ed. Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham

Lewis. New York: New Directions, 1985.

Meyers, Jeffrey.    The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis. London:

Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.

Michaelis, Meir.    Mussolini and the Jews.    Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1978.

Nichols, Peter.    Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics, and Writing. London:

Macmillan, 1984.

Paige, D. D., ed. Selected Letters of Ezra Pound. London: Faber and

Faber, 1951.

Parker, R. A. C.    Europe 1919-1945. London: Weidenfield and

Nicolson, 1969.

Perloff, Marjorie.    “Fascism, Anti-Semitism, Isolation:

Contextualizing the ‘Case of E. P.’” Paideuma 16 (Winter

1987), 7-21.

Pound, Ezra.    The Cantos of Ezra Pound New York: New Directions,

1970.

---------------.    Jefferson and/or Mussolini. [1935] New York:

Liveright, 1970.

---------------.    “Letters to Woodward,” Paideuma 15 (Spring,

1986), 105-120.

Zapponi, Niccolò.    L'Italia di Ezra Pound Roma: Bulzoni, 1976.

NOTES

11. “Fascism” is Mussolini’s label for his own party, which was initially no more than his personal political vehicle. However, I use the term in its now standard general sense to include all the right-wing totalitarian regimes of Europe that modelled themselves onMussolini’s success. Sir Oswald Mosley, for example, called his own party the “British Union of Fascists.” Hitler’s party was called theNationalsocialist or Nazi party, but I mean to include it as well as Franco’s party under the label of “fascism.” On the other hand, I restrict “fascist” to those European regimes of the nineteen twenties, thirties and forties, and would notextend it to include all non-socialist regimes before and after the 1939-45 war as some current neo-Marxist writers do. Nor would I consider the Japanese regime of the same period to be Fascist even though it was clearly totalitarian and allied itself with the Axis. It seems to have been a military oligarchy under a compliant emperor.In any case the Japanese were never obliged to rationalize a departure from liberal democracy, nor to articulate an alternative toCommunism. And both of these negative necessities go a long way to account for the ideological component of fascism in my somewhat restricted sense. One last cavil is perhaps worth making. All fascist regimes of the period were authoritarian, but not all authoritarian regimes werefascist -- Rivera’s Spain, Pilsudski’s Poland, and Stalin’s Soviet Union were non-fascist authoritarian regimes. I wish to disassociatemyself from those who equate authority with fascism. Lumping together Mussolini, Genghis Khan and the Ayatollah Khoumeni as fascists just because they are all authoritarian and two of them are anti-communist does not contribute to our understanding of them or offascism.

For discussions of fascism published after the original publication of this paper see: Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology. Princeton: Princeton UP 1989, and Roger Griffin, ed. Fascism. Oxford: Oxford UP 1995.22. To be fair to Pound, it should be noted that he expresses much the same notion as early as “Patria Mia,” appearing in The New Age in 1912. It is an idea he fund to be endemic in the Kensington of AllanUpward and G. R. S Mead in his London years (1909-20). For a discussion of this milieu see my “Economics and Eleusis” San José StudiesXII (Fall, 1986) 58-66.33. Peter Dale Scott offers a spirited and subtle defence of Pound'’poetry in spite of the politics in “Anger and Poetic Politics in Rock

Drill” San José Studies XII (Fall 1986), 68-82.44. The questions were undoubtedly the eight questions later published in a handbill entitle Volitionist Economics:

Which of the following statements do you agree with? 1. It is an outrage that the state shd. run into debt to individuals by the act and in the act of creating real wealth. 2. Several nations recognize the necessity of distributing purchasing power. They do actually distribute it. The question is whether it shd. be distributed as favour to corporations; as reward for not having a job; or impartially and per capita. 3. A country CAN have one currency for internal use, and another good both for home and foreign use. 4. If money is regarded as certificate of work done, taxes are no longer necessary. 5. It is possible to concentrate all taxation onto the actual paper money of a country (or onto one sort of its money). 6. You can issue valid paper money against any commodity UP TO the amount of that commodity that people WANT. 7. Some of the commonest failures of clarity among economists are due to using one word to signify two or more different concepts: such as, DEMAND, meaning sometimes WANT and sometimes power to buy; authoritative, meaning also responsible. 8. It is an outrage that the owner of one commodity cannot exchange it with someone possessing another, without being impeded or taxed by a third party holding a monopoly over some third substance or controlling some convention regardless or what it be called.

Gallup places the handbill in 1934, sometime before August 18 (Item E.m). We will return to the fate of these questions later in the discussion.55. Pound was not alone in succumbing to Mussolin’'s personal magnetism. Richard Collier collects a few laudatory comments by dignitries:

His confiding, ingenuous manner, his voice, low-pitched and melodious, made most people take to him on sight. No less a being than Mahatma Gandhi lamented: “Unfortunately, I am no superman like Mussolini.” The Archbishop of Canterbury saw him as “the one giant figure in Europe.” The banker, Otto Khan, declared: “The world owes him a debt of gratitude.” “He was,”

avowed Thomas Edison, “the greatest genius of the modern age.” (Collier 93)

66. When one thinks of the men with whom Pound was closely associated and their careers, one is tempted to suspect that he admired rather eccentric characters. A. R. Orage, T. E. Hulme, Wyndham Lewis, Gerhart Münch, even William Butler Yeats were extraordinary individuals whose distinguishing property was not moral“character.” If one includes some of the people he favoured during his stay at St. Elizabeth’s, the list of close acquaintances becomes even wilder. (See Alec Marsh, John Kaspar and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic 2015). Of course, we expect artists to be eccentric, but perhaps spending your life with eccentric grandstanders is not good training for assessing political leaders.77. I do not propose to discuss the relevance of Pound’s economic views here. It is generally, and correctly, maintained that neither Mussolini nor Hitler adopted or approved of either the Douglasite or Gesellist economic programs that Pound was constantly advocating. There is no doubt, however, that Pound's Social Credit economics werethe source of the political radicalization that was a necessary precondition for his infatuation with Mussolini. I have discussed Pound's economic education and beliefs elsewhere: A Light from Eleusis, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979 (especially IV .2); “Ezra Pound and British Radicalism, English Studies in Canada IX (Dec. 1983) 435-51; “Economics and Eleusis,” San José Studies XII (Fall 1986) 58-66; Pound In Purgatory: Ezra Pound’s Descent from Economic Radicalism into Anti- Semitism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1999, and Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia: Literary Modernism and Politics. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP 2011.88. “Ooze” is presumably Roosevelt, but I don't know what Pound is referring to in the remark that Roosevelt brought in the savages. Itis just possible that he is referring to the presence of Blacks in the American armed forces. He was involved with American racists at the time of this letter. His remark that it was not Mussolini who was an ally of Moscow, reflects the hysterical or McCarthyist anti-communism of the fifties, and does nothing to enhance my estimate of his political sagacity. Of course, the USSR became an ally of Britain and the Commonwealth after it was invaded by Germany. After Pearl Harbour, the USA became an ally of Britain and the Soviet Union.99. Pound did not read Lewis’s Hitler until late in 1937 (Materer, Letter #166).

1010. In 1931 Gottfried Feder was a Nazi member of the Reichstag and the Nazi economic critic. He blamed Leihkapital (“loan capital”) and international finance for the economic difficulties of the 1930s.His critique of capitalism had several points of contact with Douglas’s – especially his focus on the issue of bank credit. Hitlergot rid of Feder in 1936 under pressure from German industrialists, even though he had endorsed Fede’'s economic ideas in Mein Kampf (chapter VIII) as Pound notes in the letter to Münch cited above. (Pound does not note that Hitler had dismissed Feder from his cabinet.)

1111. The French “handiwork” to which Lewis refers is the Treaty of Versailles and the war reparations imposed on Germany. These were widely believed by the British to be unwise and a leading cause of the war. J. M. Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace set the tone for British opinion here. The French felt rather differently. Interestingly the Americans were not criticized for their refusal to forgive the war debts owed to them by Britain and France. Nonetheless, France was thought by the British and Americans to be malicious in its effort to collect some compensation from Germany forthe great damage done to French property. See Parker pp. 244-5. In The Hitler Cult Lewis cites strongly anti-French British opinion on this point (pp. 28-9) even after war had been declared in 1939.1212. It is interesting that Pound said virtually the same thing about New York in “Patria Mia,” a series of articles on the United States that he wrote in 1912. He was always looking for action, and wanted to be at the centre of it. (For a discussion of “Patria Mia” see A Light from Eleusis, 139-46.)1313. Pound's remark to the American historian, W. E. Woodward supports the notion that Pound was simply flattered out of his sensesby Mussolini’s attention. Speaking of his lack of enthusiasm for a visit to the United States Pound remarks:

At the same time I am willing to come IF it wd/ be the least god damn use. I am willing to talk sense to old Prof/ Warren. If Muss/ who is more a man than F/D/ can take off a half hour to THINK about wot I way to him/ bigod I ain't going to set in anybody's front hall asking permission from anybody’s third footman to hang up me cap/

(Letter of Feb. 7, 1934. "Letters to Woodward," 119)

1414. The letter is dated Dec. 14, 1932. Beinecke, Yale Collection,Pound Za Folder Bef-Bk 1935-58. Most of the letters from Bird to Pound are from this collection. For clarity I indicate the source aseither the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana or the Beineckein each case. All previously unpublished Pound letters are by permission of the Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust and come under the Trust’s copyright 1988.1515. This letter is dated Jan. 13, 1933 and is in the Beinecke, same Collection and folder as the previous letter. I have been unable to identify Mont Schuyler. The Montgomery Schuyler’s in American dictionaries of biography could not be this man – whom Pounddid remember. We learn in another letter that he was a cousin of Bird’s. H. Scott is Howard Scott, co-founder of the American fascistic movement, Technocracy.1616. Letter to Wm. Bird, Feb. 24, 1934. Lilly, Bird Coll., Folder 1931-39.1717. Feb. 28, 1934. (Beinecke Za Pound Folder Bef-Bk 1935-58) Keynes is John Maynard Keynes, the English economist. However, in 1934, he was known primarily for The Economic Consequences of the Peace, a work predicting that the Peace of Versailles would destroy the German economy and possibly lead to war. The General Theory of Employment,Interest, and Money which instituted "Keynsianism" was not published until1936.1818. Lilly Library, Bird Collection, Folder 1931-39. The letter has been placed in 1935 by an archivist, and that date would seem to be correct on internal evidence. 1919. Beinecke Za Pound Folder 145, “Letters by Wm. Bird and from Pound” The letter is dated July 22, [1935].