Understanding Pound's Changing Views on Mussolini and Italian Fascism
Certainly one of the difficulties faced by criticism of Ezra Pound's Cantos has been the sheer difficulty of coming to terms with the constantly changing nature and design of the poem. The initial attempts to define that design proceeded largely in spatial and atemporal terms, describing an unchanging plan Pound presumably began the poem with and then proceeded to execute.1 But after the work of Stanley Fish and other reader-response critics, contemporary criticism is far more comfortable with poems being dynamic entities, and both because of this shift and because none of the static designs has proven generally persuasive, recent criticism has moved away from thinking in terms of a grand structure towards a more dynamic and historical sense of the poem.2 Pound always had a sense of the poem's design, but that sense kept changing and the task of the critic should be to map those changes rather than opt for one of the designs held by Pound at some point as being the right one. So we now speak of the early Cantos, the middle Cantos, the later Cantos, with an awareness that there are some very real and palpable differences among these various sections.
But we should be careful not to be too complacent about our superiority to the earlier, more spatial and holistic critics. For there remains a tendency to make the poem static in a subtler way, which is that—consciously or unconsciously—we assume that though differences exist between the early, middle and later Cantos, each section of the poem is a relatively coherent and unchanging entity. Our very terms, early, middle, and later, have that assumption built into them. In my own earlier work on the Cantos, for instance, I argued for a dynamic or historical conception of the poem and its design. My argument was that the concerns and conceptions of the middle Cantos were fundamentally different from those of the early Cantos and that Pound had radically reconceived the poem around Canto 30.3 I still believe that to be the case. But in my discussion, I referred to the middle Cantos as if they formed a distinct and unchanging entity, a smaller static poem in the middle of a larger, more dynamic one. This is particularly disturbing in retrospect because the focus of my discussion was the political implications of the middle Cantos, and these Cantos were written across the 1930s, years when the world's political landscape was changing very quickly. Even if Pound continued to be pro-fascist in this period, what it meant to be a Fascist changed radically between 1922 and 1942, or even between 1942 and 1944. Continuity in terminology can lead us to ignore real differences beneath the surface.
In this essay, I want to show—by focusing on one central current of the middle Cantos—how Pound's interests and plans kept changing throughout these cantos. The American Revolution is a major concern of the middle Cantos, but here as elsewhere, it is easy to assume a greater degree of continuity than actually obtains. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams are the two figures of the American Revolution Pound portrays at length, and this selectivity might lead us to assume that Pound saw similar virtues in the two men. But arguing against this is the historical fact that at important moments Adams and Jefferson were antagonists. Though they worked together at the time of the Declaration of Independence and reconciled their differences in the correspondence of their final years, in between, at the time of their respective presidencies, they were bitter political enemies and held radically different political philosophies. There is no reason to assume that Pound was unaware of this tension and divergence.4 It is true that at times Pound minimized this conflict, emphasizing Jefferson's and Adams's areas of agreement more than their areas of disagreement.5 But he was clearly aware of those disagreements, clearly aware that Jefferson and Adams stood for quite different aspects of the American Revolution. Initially, Jefferson was the figure who captured Pound's attention, but by the time of Guide to Kulchur (1938), his interest had shifted and he had begun to see Adams as the more profound figure: “The tragedy of the U.S.A. over 160 years is the decline of Adamses. More and more we cd., if we examined events, see that John Adams had the corrective for Jefferson.”6
So Pound was aware of the differences between these men, and his shift in attention from one to the other is not accidental. What I hope to show here is that the Cantos' shift in focus from Jefferson to Adams represents a crucial shift in Pound's values across the 1930s. This shift does not mean we can interpret Pound's political commitment to Italian Fascism in the 1930s as wavering or uncertain. Pound unfortunately remained dedicated to Mussolini across the decade, and both Jefferson and Adams, in Pound's view, are to be equated with Mussolini. But this means that the shift in Pound's emphasis on the American revolution also corresponds to a shift in his vision of Mussolini and Italian Fascism. The content of Pound's political commitment kept changing in ways we need to trace and understand if we wish to understand the poem that is the most complex expression of that commitment.
Pound's interest in Thomas Jefferson has received considerably less attention than many of his more recondite interests. This might seem surprising and a confirmation of Pound's point about the sad neglect of the writings of the founding fathers if it did not have a simpler explanation. Pound's interest in Jefferson is inextricably bound up with the scandal of Pound's politics, and by Pound himself, whose central work on Jefferson (aside from the Jefferson Cantos) he titled Jefferson and/or Mussolini. And one index of the scandal represented by this book is the difficulty it has had getting (and staying) published: written in 1933, it was turned down—in Pound's account—by forty publishers and published only in 1935.7 Pound himself then tried to suppress it later in life when Horace Liveright put it back into print in 1970. The reprinted volume states on the back: “This book is being reissued under a contract which was executed in 1935 and does not necessarily reflect Ezra Pound's later views.” And it is easy enough to see why this comparison of the drafter of the Declaration of Independence, the architect of Monticello, and the founder of the University of Virginia and the Library of Congress to the Italian Fascist dictator Mussolini would provoke its share of outrage. It is possible to depoliticize Pound's interest in Confucius or Dante and focus on the aesthetic or cultural aspect of his interest in their work. But faced with Jefferson and/or Mussolini, one can do no such thing with Pound's interest in Jefferson. As a result, Pound's portrait of Jefferson (and his portrait of Revolutionary America) has received little serious attention.8
But Jefferson makes his way into the Cantos before the writing of Jefferson and/or Mussolini, and we need to distinguish between the Jefferson of the early Cantos and the Jefferson of Jefferson and/or Mussolini and the middle Cantos. Jefferson first appears in Canto 21, in the middle of a canto devoted to the Medici family, and then is the subject of Cantos 31-34, a series of cantos focusing on the American Revolution.9 Jefferson's first appearance in the Cantos is unforgettable: “‘Could you,’ wrote Mr. Jefferson, / ‘find me a gardener / who can play the french horn?’”10 Thus begins the portion of a letter to Giovanni Fabroni Pound quotes (and rearranges) in Canto 21, and this is a “luminous detail” for Pound, showing Jefferson's dedication to culture and pragmatic approach to obtaining it. He hopes eventually to have a full band of musicians among his domestic servants, and this miraculous combination of gardener and french horn player would presumably be the first step in this direction. Meaning in the Cantos is always created by juxtaposition, so Pound's juxtaposition of Jefferson and the Medici in Canto 21 is hardly accidental. The effect of the juxtaposition is to relate Jefferson's particular dedication to the arts to that of the Medici. They are all statesmen dedicated to art, a combination celebrated at length by Pound throughout the early Cantos. The Italian Renaissance is, of course, a good place to find and celebrate such a combination, and the Medici are conventional figures for this.
Pound's central figure for the Italian Renaissance prince and patron of the arts, however, is not a Medici. It is the notorious condottiere Sigismundo Malatesta, hero of the Malatesta Cantos (Cantos 8-11), and Pound links Malatesta and Jefferson in a number of ways that strengthen the overall presentation of Jefferson as a “Renaissance man.” In the middle of the passage quoting from Jefferson's letter in Canto 21, the Italian words “affatigandose per suo piacere o non” are included parenthetically (21/97). The alert reader of the Cantos will realize that these words have appeared before: they are a repetition of Canto 8, the first Malatesta Canto, from another letter, this one written by Sigismundo Malatesta to Giovanni de' Medici. In Canto 8, the letter is rendered by Pound in idiomatic English, and this phrase is rendered as:
So that he can work as he likes,
Or waste his time as he likes
(8/29)
The original Italian then follows parenthetically, just as in Canto 21. Malatesta is describing his practice of hiring artists on subsidy, not paying them just for completed work. The letter from which this phrase comes is mostly about a painter Malatesta would like to hire from Florence, and the subject rhyme between this letter and Jefferson's, underscored by the Medicean context of both letters (one historical, the other created by Pound), is clear enough.11
Malatesta and Jefferson, then, no lazy dilettantes, do not merely appreciate culture. They directly call it into being by their own activity, activity that is here represented by their correspondence. Pound—one of the century's most voluminous letter writers—would have particularly appreciated their correspondence, of course, but that is not the only reason for his focus here on letters. Another link between the two men is that their cultural creativity is ultimately best represented by works of architecture, in Malatesta's Tempio and in Jefferson's Monticello and University of Virginia, all of which share a classicizing impulse. But Pound is being true to his own aesthetic of presentation by presenting their words, which he can do directly, rather than their architecture, which cannot really be represented appropriately through the medium of language. Yet it is noted in Canto 21 that Jefferson's letter was penned at Monticello, and this is Pound's way of indicating the existence of that which he cannot adequately represent.
So Jefferson's first appearance in the Cantos has nothing to do with Mussolini. He is presented as an Italian Renaissance prince in the context of revolutionary America, concerned above all with creating art and culture. The relation of power to culture was an—perhaps the—important theme in the early Cantos, and the central theme of Pound's nascent politics at this point was simply that power has an imperative to create art, or, more precisely, to be art. This is a familiar way of looking at the Renaissance; the first part of Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy is entitled “The State as a Work of Art.”12 For Pound as well as for Burckhardt, this merging of two domains now kept sharply separate was an important reason for the Renaissance's exemplary status. And though Burckhardt of course does not mention him, Pound's paradigmatic eye sees—correctly, I think—the same idea operative in Jefferson.
The relation between Malatesta and Jefferson, made clear enough by Pound himself, has been widely—if not thoroughly—discussed in the criticism of the Cantos.13 Yet the terms in which that parallel has been considered have been largely those of the early Cantos, of the statesman as artist. But only in the early Cantos does Pound rest content with praising statesmen for their relation to art. In the middle Cantos, what they do as statesmen begins to occupy him: here Pound lines Jefferson up not just with Malatesta but also with Mussolini. We have made better sense of the Malatesta/Jefferson parallel in the early Cantos than of the Jefferson/Mussolini parallel in Pound's prose and the middle Cantos.
But Pound does not abandon the Italian Renaissance frame already established for Jefferson in the middle Cantos. Malatesta is perhaps the central figure of the first enduring block of cantos, A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930), and the central setting of these cantos is surely the Italian Renaissance. The cantos on Jefferson and the American Revolution, Cantos 31-34, are the opening block of the next section, Eleven New Cantos (1934), and they begin:
Tempus loquendi,
Tempus tacendi.
Said Mr Jefferson:
(31/153)
Then follows another of Jefferson's letters. The first two lines, “There is a time to speak, there is a time to be silent,” were Sigismundo Malatesta's motto, words he put on his wife Isotta's tomb in the Tempio Malatestiana. They are also, of course, the Latin Vulgate rendering of Ecclesiastes 3:7, but with a difference: the Vulgate reads “Tempus tacendi, tempus loquendi,” with an emphasis on that time to be silent. Malatesta's emphasis, characteristically for him as for Pound, was on speaking.14
So the Italian Renaissance frame remains relevant to Pound's Jeffersonianism as it becomes less a matter of cultural politics and more a matter of political theory. To put it another way, the Jefferson/Mussolini parallel is really a Malatesta/Jefferson/Mussolini parallel. And if we seriously examine how Malatesta and Jefferson could be connected in Pound's political thinking, we find that Pound's thinking anticipates much contemporary scholarship, particularly the work of J. G. A. Pocock. There are ways in which the political thinking of Jefferson can be related to figures like Malatesta, and understanding that allows us to make better sense of the further Jefferson/Mussolini equation and connect Pound's interest in Jefferson with some themes of his economics.
What made Pound's portrait of Thomas Jefferson seem so bizarre and anomalous when he advanced it in the 1930s was its radical departure from what Pocock calls the “Lockean paradigm,” the notion that the Declaration of Independence in particular and the American Revolution in general were essentially products of the political thought of Lockean liberalism.15 That paradigm, having come under attack from a number of directions, no longer holds the unquestioned sway it did fifty years ago, and in this respect Pound's portrait of Jefferson anticipated the direction of contemporary scholarship. There are a number of competing paradigms vying to supplant Locke: for example, Garry Wills's Inventing America presents the Scottish moral and common sense philosophers as the central source of Jefferson's ideas.16 But Wills's work is less relevant to my concerns here than Pocock's, particularly The Machiavellian Moment, for Pocock's central contention that the Italian Renaissance concern with virtue (or virtù) and corruption becomes the enduring concern of Anglo-American political thought in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is remarkably parallel to Pound's presentation of Jefferson. Pocock's study furthermore argues that this dialectic of virtue and corruption remains central to American political thinking. I would argue not only that Pocock's and Pound's Jeffersons are remarkably akin, but also that Pocock's work goes a long way towards explaining Pound's own Jeffersonianism, his particular version of the larger “dialectic of virtue and corruption” we in America have inherited from the Italian Renaissance.17 It thus not only provides a richer context for Pound's comparison of Jefferson to Malatesta; in the way it relates Jefferson to the Renaissance, it goes a long way towards explaining Pound's subsequent comparison of Jefferson to Mussolini.
Pocock's study is enormously complex and wide ranging, and what follows will just touch on what is relevant to my purpose here. The major thrust of his study is to argue that there is a line of influence running from the political theoreticians of the Florentine Renaissance, preeminently Machiavelli and Guicciardini, through seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England to the thought of the American Revolution and beyond. This inheritance persists at least partially because the problems to which the Italian thinkers were responding persist. There is a recurring Machiavellian moment because there is a recurring dilemma or problematic: thus, in Pocock's presentation as well as in Pound's, there is a parallel between the Italian Renaissance and the American Revolution as well as a line of influence from the former to the latter.
The central dilemma that any republic must face is the fact that republics have across history been intermittent anomalies, often destroyed from within rather than from without. Unlike monarchism, republicanism as an ideology is faced with the problem of time: how can a republic survive its enemies and last across time? In the Renaissance, the essential enemy is named corruption: republics fail because they grow corrupt. And, to simplify, there are two lines on how to stave off corruption. The first, linked closely to what Pocock calls the Venetian myth and expressed in the work of Guicciardini, argues that one staves off corruption by perfecting the machinery of government and by balancing conflicting forces. This line of thought, largely alien to Jefferson (and originally to Pound), nonetheless runs down to the American Revolution and persists in the thinking of John Adams and in the doctrine of “checks and balances” implicit in the Constitution. The second, associated especially with Machiavelli, argues that virtù or virtue alone counteracts corruption; no given set of machinery is incorruptible.
Virtue of course means different things to different people, and Machiavelli uses the word in rather a specialized or technical sense.18 For Machiavelli, virtù is above all activity and innovation: one must avoid depending upon any set of preconceptions and face the newness of any situation newly. And here we find the common thread that connects Mussolini to Jefferson and Jefferson to Malatesta.
How does Machiavellian virtù connect Jefferson and Mussolini for Pound? He admits that differences between Jefferson's and Mussolini's particular actions exist, but he nonetheless insists that, faced with Mussolini's situation, Jefferson would have found the same means:
I don't propose to limit my analysis to what Tom Jefferson recommended in a particular time and place. I am concerned with what he actually did, with the way his mind worked both when faced with a particular problem in a particular geography and when faced with the unending problem of CHANGE.
If Mussolini had tried to fool himself into finding or into trying to find the identical solution for Italy 1922-1932 that Jefferson found for America 1776-1820, there would have been no fascist decennio.
(JM, 11)
This is pure Machiavelli: as the world changes, so too must the means of a ruler. And this view enables Pound to argue that much of what has been taken as the political legacy of Jefferson was rather his particular response to a particular situation. The cast of mind revealed by that adaptiveness and quality of innovation is for Pound the true Jeffersonian legacy:
The truth is that Jefferson used verbal formulations as tools. He was not afflicted by fixations. Neither he nor Mussolini has been really interested in governmental machinery. That is not paradox, they have both invented it and used it, but they have both been much more deeply interested in something else.
Jefferson found himself in a condition of things that had no precedent in any remembered world. He saw like a shot that a new system and new mechanisms MUST come into being to meet it.
He was agrarian IN the colonies and in the U.S.A of HIS TIME, that is to say a time when, and a place where, there was abundance and superabundance of land.
(JM, 62)
Clearly, what Pound is praising in Jefferson in these passages is the spirit of innovation that according to Machiavelli is the only thing that can stave off a republic's decline.19 And the connection between this view and Pound's support of Mussolini is not hard to find; according to Pound, those who came after Jefferson lost the animating spirit of virtue that alone made the machinery work:
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.
(JM, 94-95)
The subsequent absence of this “de facto government” led to such corruption that in Pound's day only radically different means—or so he thought—could restore health to the body politic: “Hence my attention to the NEXT social construction. Next in point of time, next SYSTEM of government set up in the AIM that ours was, namely of providing a BETTER system of government than had BEEN BEFORE put in motion anywhere on earth in the occident.”20 Thus what is essential to good government is having the right aim and then acting upon it, and the similarity Pound perceives in this respect between Jefferson and Mussolini is more important than the obvious differences between their methods. Thus for Pound as well as for Machiavelli, virtù in the sense of activity—getting something done—is the key element in the survival of a republic, in good government. And virtù in very close to this sense is a key word in Cavalcanti's “Donna Mi Pregha,” a word that Pound leaves untranslated in his rendering of the Cavalcanti poem in Canto 36 (36/177).21 The value Pound places on activity here links up with other aspects of his thought, for instance his endorsement in Canto 13 of Confucius taking a cane to the contemplative philosopher Yuan Jang, “You old fool, come out of it, / Get up and do something useful” (13/59).
This focus on action is not what most of us mean by virtue, and indeed it has been this kind of Machiavellian functionalism or operationalism that has given the Florentine such a bad name.22 But in Pocock's analysis, the more common meaning of virtue nonetheless adheres to the Machiavellian tradition as it finds its way to England and America. (Perhaps one way of locating Pound's originality in this tradition is that he doesn't inherit the tradition as mediated in Anglo-American culture; rather, he takes it from the Renaissance and then applies it to the American Revolution.) The familiar conception of America is that as the New World it reacted against the traditionalism of the Old, specifically against monarchy, religious despotism, and feudal land tenure. But Pocock also presents the ideologues of the American revolution as reacting strongly against a kind of modernity as well, against the complex and often corrupt commercial and financial machinery that ran the British Empire. (Hamilton is, of course, the conspicuous exception and as such, earns Pound's utmost opprobrium as “the Prime snot in ALL American history” [67/350]). In this they were inheriting the rhetoric of the eighteenth-century Old Whig or Country party, and behind that rhetoric—in Pocock's analysis—is Florentine republican thought. Thus Jefferson's famous celebration of the virtue of the freehold farmer in Notes on the State of Virginia and elsewhere involves a critique of the corruption of modern finance as well as a critique of the oppression of feudal patterns of land ownership. In this view, individuals as well as states must stay free of entangling foreign alliances. Virtue and independence are concomitant terms just as corruption and dependence are. To cite Pocock's most succinct formulation of this theme, “The ideal of the patriot or citizen entailed the image of a personality free and virtuous because unspecialized. The function of his property was to give him independence and autonomy as well as the leisure and liberty to engage in public affairs; but his capacity to bear arms in the public cause was an end of his property and the test of his virtue.”23
This antimodern strata of eighteenth-century thought delineated by Pocock sounds again and again remarkably like Pound. Pound's radio speeches repeatedly invoked the related ideal of a free yeomanry, each family with its own homestead, free of debt. And this is the key respect in which Pound's Jeffersonianism links up with his economics. The primary enemy of country ideologue and Pound alike was finance and international banking, and for both the founding of the Bank of England in 1694 is a key moment. Pocock explains the significance of the founding of the Bank in terms similar to Pound's, as the decisive moment in which real property was replaced by credit as the basis of the economy,
that is to say, by men's expectations of one another's capacity for future action and performance. Since a credit mechanism was an expansive and dynamic social device, the beliefs men had to form and maintain concerning one another were more than simple expectations of another's capacity to pay what he had borrowed, to perform what he had promised; they were boom-time beliefs, obliging men to credit one another with capacity to expand and grow and become what they were not. Far more than the practice of trade and profit, even at their most speculative, the growth of public credit obliged capitalist society to develop as an ideology something society had never possessed before, the image of a secular and historical future.24
This political tradition certainly succeeds in making virtue sound more attractive than commerce, but its anticommercial and antimodern rhetoric of virtue had a disabling flaw, one inherited by both Jefferson and Pound. Commerce and mercantilism seemed to generate corruption, but Jefferson (and America as a whole) wanted to reject the corruption without returning to a precommercial, feudal economy. They never developed a basis on which to sort out the good aspects of modernity from the bad. Jefferson unrealistically hoped that we could simply leave the bad aspects on the other side of the Atlantic: he wanted us to import our manufactured goods precisely so that we could retain our virtue and not be corrupted by the machinations of commerce. But he still wanted those modern goods. This is less a useful defense against or critique of corruption than an attempt to run away and hide from it. Comparably, Pound accepts every aspect of the technologically advanced capitalist method of production except the means used to finance it, as if finance were a diseased tumor one could easily cut out.
One connection between Pound and the eighteenth century is that, as Pocock points out, this dialectic of virtue and corruption runs throughout American culture and history. It certainly informed the settling of the West and the mystique of the frontier: virtue lay in getting outside of known and settled ground. Yet, like Jefferson's nation of virtuous importers, the myth of the West carried the seeds of its own destruction: moving away from settlements led in turn to the West filling up with settlements, just as surely as our importing manufactured goods led to our manufacturing them here. But in Pound's time as well as in our own, the populist critique of corruption remained an important part of American culture, particularly in the West, fueling William Jennings Bryan's “cross of gold” rhetoric in Pound's youth and, in the very years under study, carrying the Social Credit movement to victory just across the border from Idaho in Alberta.
Paradoxically, though these populist expressions of the Machiavellian moment tend towards antistatist positions, Pound's Jeffersonian concern with corruption quickly led him in the opposite direction. Pound argued that in the years since Jefferson's death the forces of corruption had grown enormously, and this growth required an enormous growth in power by the state to preserve the freedom of the individual:
The demarcation between public and private affairs shifts with the change in the bases of production. A thousand peasants each growing food on his own fields can exist without trust laws.
(JM, 45)
But today we cannot exist without trust laws; we need the virtuously exercised power of the state to protect us against the unvirtuous and corrupt forces of finance. As Pound quoted Adams in Canto 62,
republican jealously which seeks to cut off all power
from fear of abuses does
quite as much harm as a despotism
(62/344)
And this is the paradox of Pound's Jeffersonianism: Pound came to embrace despotism precisely to free us from what he perceived to be a greater despotism.
But the Machiavellian context Pocock's work provides for us gives us a way to understand, if not to accept, that paradox. And I think we should be able to see by now that Pound's portrait of Jefferson was deeply Machiavellian, in precisely the senses Pocock finds the American Revolution in general to be Machiavellian. Malatesta, though unmentioned in The Prince, is the perfect Machiavellian innovator, and Pound's portrait of Jefferson as the Malatesta of his era is deeply Machiavellian in its stress on action and innovation. The early Cantos are more concerned than Machiavelli with art as a duty of the prince; but that theme progressively disappears in the middle Cantos, and Cantos 31-34 are far more concerned with Jefferson governing than with Jefferson calling art into being.
Jefferson is more concerned than Malatesta or Machiavelli with virtue as well as virtù, and in this respect Pound's portrait of Jefferson is in harmony with the Machiavellian tradition in Anglo-American political thought as portrayed by Pocock, with its emphasis on virtuous opposition to financial corruption. Pound's Jefferson is the man opposed to the national debt, opposed to domestic industries, and committed to the freehold or yeoman tradition of liberty and independence. In all these respects, Pound's Jefferson is a man far closer to our contemporary portrait of Jefferson than was the conventional Jefferson of 1935, measured against which Pound's Jefferson seems so bizarre.
Moreover, this context for Jefferson established by Pocock makes more sense of both Pound's comparison of Jefferson to Mussolini and his subsequent shift in interest from Jefferson to Adams. At this point, Jefferson represented for Pound the possibility of radical transformation, the Machiavellian energy inherent in revolution. This particularly fascinated Pound in the early 1930s, as he was looking for a radical alternative to the status quo that he condemned as static and incapable of renovation. (And this is of course a shift from his initial interest in Thomas Jefferson as a ruler interested in culture, the Jefferson of Canto 21.) He was prepared to look anywhere for this alternative, to Social Credit, to Gesellian economics, to Mussolini, to Marx, later briefly to Roosevelt, to anyone who offered a radical alternative.25 And it was this free-floating, ideologically eclectic nature of Pound's political thinking that led him to be attracted by the Machiavellian tradition of political thought, with its emphasis on doing something. Mussolini, thus, was Jeffersonian and preferable to the other alternatives for Pound in the early 1930s less because of the specific content of his ideas than because of his bias towards action. This was precisely what Wyndham Lewis criticized about Fascism in Time and Western Man, that with its bias towards action it was simply “Futurism in practice.”26 Unlike Lewis, Pound praised Mussolini's bias towards action in many different ways in these years, through references to Mussolini clearing the Pontine Marshes, increasing the amount of land under cultivation (see Canto 41/202), and so on.
Across the 1930s, however, the plasticity or free wheeling nature of Pound's politics disappeared. He became committed to Mussolini as the alternative, the possibility for a just society, and not just as a stick to beat the status quo over the head with. Pound moved, in short, from seeing Mussolini as a figure to oppose to the existing malign order to seeing him as the promulgator of a new, desirable order that needed defense.27 And as his interest in Mussolini became more firmly linked to what Mussolini was for, not just what he was against, or even who was against him, Pound needed a new figure to serve as Mussolini's parallel in the Cantos. Jefferson's philosophy of energy and innovation would no longer do. But now that Pound had a governmental order he wanted to defend, Adams, given his political philosophy of order and balance, served perfectly. And there is a parallel or subject rhyme, of course, between Adams's politics and the Confucian thought that so interested Pound at this point, indicated by the appearance of the ideogram chung (see p. 520), or balance, at various points in the Adams Cantos.
This is the context in which we need to understand Pound's shift in attention from Jefferson to Adams and his statement that Adams provided the “corrective” for Jefferson. If the figures of Jefferson and Adams do not completely explain Pound's shifting politics across the 1930s, they serve as a good index of that shift. The middle Cantos begin as if Thomas Jefferson is to be the central figure, the Malatesta of the American Revolution in a way that would point forward to Mussolini as the Malatesta/Jefferson of our time. But after Canto 35, Jefferson largely disappears from the Cantos, and Pound's interest shifts to Martin Van Buren, to periods and realms other than the American Revolution, and finally, when he returns to the Revolution in Cantos 62-71, to John Adams. Comparably, Jefferson and/or Mussolini was written in 1933 and published in 1935; after a brief period of balanced interest in the two men, particularly in their correspondence, the subject of Pound's 1937 essay “The Jefferson/Adams Letters as a Shrine and a Monument,” Pound's interest in his prose shifts to Adams as well. By the time of Guide to Kulchur (1938), the Adams Cantos (1940), and Pound's broadcasts over Rome Radio during the war, Adams has clearly taken the central position that Jefferson once occupied. In Jefferson and/or Mussolini, Adams is usually mentioned simply as one name in a list of major American thinkers and is only once referred to independently; in the radio broadcasts, Jefferson is usually mentioned only in similar lists of names and is almost never examined or discussed separately.
One reason why Adams takes the place that once belonged to Jefferson is that Pound has become concerned with the machinery of government. Earlier, in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, he argued that governmental machinery did not matter; what mattered was the will to change and the economic arrangements behind the machinery. But in his radio talks and in the Adams Cantos, he keeps coming back to the need to study systems of government: “I would remind Prof. Beard that Adams studied republics” (EPS, 393). This returns us to the Machiavellian moment, but to a different aspect of that traditional problematic. To save republics from decline into degeneracy and corruption, Machiavelli had argued that virtù was essential; Gucciardini's emphasis had instead been on getting the machinery right. And the myth of Venice is a myth of a governmental system so perfectly balanced that degeneracy never set in. Adams, fascinated by constitutions and author of a substantial if widely criticized contribution to constitutional theory, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America against the attack of M. Turgot, in his Letter to Dr. Price, Dated the Twenty-Second Day of March, 1778 (1786-1787), is clearly in the Gucciardinian—not the Machiavellian—tradition, and by the late 1930s Pound inclined to that side as well, as the cento of quotations from Adams's Defence in Cantos 67 and 68 (67-68/393-395) clearly shows. “Johnnie wanted to know what really was the best form of government. And more than any other man, not excludin' Jim Madison and Thomas Jefferson, he got on the trail” (EPS, 390).
For Pound, American history showed that the Machiavellian emphasis on virtù is flawed because it proved incapable of establishing stability. The American Revolution failed to sustain its originating virtù past the Civil War, and Pound's sense was that more attention to the “best form of government” might have staved off that failure. The problem with emphasizing men with virtù is this: what happens when they die out or are shoved out? For Pound the history of the Adams family showed that in America they were shoved out, replaced by less capable and less virtuous men. And the consequent need to focus on governmental machinery is a recurrent theme in the Adams Cantos:
and mankind dare not yet think upon
CONSTITUTIONS
(68/395)
how small in
any nation the number who comprehend ANY
system of constitution or administration
and these few do not unite
(70/412)
I am for balance
and know not how it is but mankind have an aversion
to any study of government
(70/413)
No people in Europe cares anything
about constitutions, 1815, whatsoever
not one of 'em understands or is capable of understanding
any consti-damn-tution whatever
(71/418)
So the Adams concerned with constitutional machinery proved more congenial to Pound than he had earlier. Just as important, the specifics of his constitutional theory proved congenial as well. The traditional problem republics failed to resolve, according to Aristotle, was how to reconcile the conflicting powers and desires of the many, the few, and the one—that is, of the forces of democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy.28 For Aristotle, each form of government tended to degenerate into its negative mirror image: democracy into anarchy, aristocracy into oligarchy, monarchy into tyranny. Polybius felt that this could be avoided by a mixed form of government which blended elements of all three, and a tradition of English thought praised the English system of the King, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons as achieving the Polybian ideal of a mixed and balanced system. And Adams's constitutional thinking, “classical to the point of archaism,” as Pocock has described it, stays almost entirely within that classical, Aristotelian-Polybian frame of reference.29 When Pound opens Canto 68 with:
The philosophers say: one, the few, the many
Regis optimatum populique
(68/395)
he is quoting a passage in Adams's Defence in which Adams is quoting Polybius. Adams's concern was always to find a Polybian balance of the one, the few, and the many: “‘You fear the one, I the few,’” we read in Canto 69 (69/407), Pound's condensation of a letter Adams wrote to Jefferson in 1787, and Adams here encapsulates his and Jefferson's differing positions within this tradition. The entire passage reads: “You are afraid of the one, I, of the few. We agree perfectly that the many should have a full, fair, and perfect representation. You are apprehensive of monarchy, I, of aristocracy.”30 Adams felt that not having a “one,” a single leader, would lead to the few dominating the many, and on these grounds he criticized the radically democratic constitutional thinking of the French Revolution (see Canto 70/412).
Pound felt that events had proven Adams, not Jefferson, correct. He thought that the democratic representation of the many was today controlled by the few, not so much a traditional and responsive aristocracy as the monied few.31 In Aristotelian terms, aristocracy had degenerated into oligarchy: “Rhetoric about ‘our representatives in Parliament’ is NOT the point. The point is that your Parliament does NOT represent you” (EPS, 134).32 And Pound felt, with Adams, that a powerful “one” was necessary to enable the many to have that “full, fair, and perfect representation.” Adams's position was already conservative within eighteenth-century political thought, and his emphasis on the “one” led to his being criticized in his lifetime for his supposed monarchical tendencies. And although Adams was no monarchist (“I am a mortal and irreconciliable enemy to monarchy”), Pound—turning that criticism into grounds for commendation—approvingly presents an Adams convinced that one must tilt towards the “one” rather than towards the few to achieve order and balance: “I am for a balance between the legislative and executive powers, and I am for enabling the executive to be at all times capable of maintaining the balance between the Senate and the House, or in other words, between the aristocratical and democratical interests.”33
This general theme is related to another reason why Adams fascinated Pound: the Adams family. Pound presents “the decline of the Adamses” as the American tragedy. Pound's obvious preference here is for the Adamses to have become in effect an American ruling family, for Charles Francis and his sons to have followed John and John Quincy as president. The Chinese History Cantos that precede the Adams Cantos similarly stress the importance both of dynastic continuity and of having a single strong ruler, and the juxtaposition of the two sets of cantos works to suggest that Adams was (or perhaps should have been) a strong ruler founding a dynasty in the Chinese sense. Pound presents the Adams family as the possible counterweight to the decline of the American revolution that did not work. They were the men with virtù who should have arrested the decline of virtù, and their failure shows that virtù alone without a proper form of government is not enough. So the failure of the Adamses paradoxically proves for Pound that Adams was right in his insistence on constitutions and the study of government.
Thus both in his prose and in the Cantos, Pound notes real differences between Adams and Jefferson and strongly endorses the position of Adams. As he put it in one of his wartime radio broadcasts, “If Jefferson had stuck by John Adams, instead of making it up when they were both on the retired list, things would have been different” (EPS, 121). Here Pound presents the differences between Adams and Jefferson as the tragic flaw of the American Revolution. Where they differed, Adams was right, and Adams is therefore the crucial figure of the American Revolution, the one whose wisdom can set us straight today: “Johnnie Adams, the first, the real father of his country” (EPS, 390).
It should be clear from everything I have said so far that Pound's portrayal of the American Revolution in the middle Cantos takes on meaning less in itself than in the complex relations Pound sets up between it and other moments in history. In the Cantos, Jefferson takes on meaning in relation to the Italian Renaissance, most notably in relation to Sigismundo Malatesta. Adams takes on meaning in relation to Chinese history, as he is the American equivalent of a Chinese Great Emperor. These comparisons have their negative side: Adams in particular is subtly reproached for being unable to found a ruling dynasty on the Chinese model; I'm not sure Pound thought Monticello quite up to the Tempio Malatestiana, either. But it should be understood that this web of relations points forwards as well as backwards: Jefferson and Adams are also to be compared to Mussolini, the Sigismundo Malatesta and Chinese Great Emperor of our time. The past gives us not information for its own sake, but points of reference for the present, and Pound's portrait of the American Revolution is intended as one crucial point of reference for Italian Fascism. But the thrust of everything I have tried to show here is that the American Revolution does not provide a stable point of reference even though it provides a continuous one. Pound's portrait of the American Revolution changed, more in response to contemporary politics than in response to new knowledge or new information. And though his argument was that Mussolini mirrored the American revolutionaries, it is easy to see the extent to which it worked the other way around. Pound's portrait of the American Revolution serves as one mirror in which we can see his image of Mussolini changing, from the Renaissance man of action to the Confucian Emperor concerned with order and stability, in short, from Jefferson to Adams.
Notes
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See especially Daniel D. Pearlman, The Barb of Time: On the Unity of Ezra Pound's Cantos (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969).
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For the best examples of Fish's redefinition of poems as dynamic entities, see two essays, “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics” (1970) and “Interpreting the Variorum” (1976), which are collected in Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980), 21-67 and 147-73, and also in Jane P. Tompkins, ed., Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), 70-100 and 164-84. Tompkins's anthology offers a good introduction to reader-response criticism. For the recent move in Pound criticism away from a grand structure, see my summary in Reed Way Dasenbrock, The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis: Towards the Condition of Painting (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1985), 191-95.
-
Dasenbrock, 202-13.
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Pound's knowledge of the American Revolution comes almost entirely from primary sources, above all from the Memorial edition of Jefferson's works given him by Eliot in the early 1920s (The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb [Washington, D.C.: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1905]) and The Works of John Adams (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1850), which he began to work through later. (For Eliot's gift, see Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound [New York: Pantheon, 1970], 294; and William M. Chace, The Political Identities of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot [Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1973], 49.) Pound's “The Jefferson-Adams Letters as a Shrine and a Monument” (originally published in the North American Review [Winter 1937-1938]; reprinted in Selected Prose, 1909-1965 [New York: New Directions, 1973], 147-58) contains his clearest statement of the importance he ascribed to the correspondence of these two men. The only secondary work on the American revolution Pound refers to in Jefferson and/or Mussolini is W. E. Woodward's George Washington, The Image and the Man (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926), which he mentions twice, and Woodward's rather breezy study seems only to have reinforced Pound's perception of Washington as rather a lightweight in contrast to Jefferson and Adams, who for him are the only figures of importance in the American Revolution. (Garry Wills's Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment [Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1984] makes Washington altogether more interesting and much closer to Pound's concerns about virtue and independence.) Pound corresponded with Woodward, and three letters of Pound's to Woodward have recently been published (“Letters to Woodward,” Paideuma 15 [Spring 1986]: 105-120). In the collection of Pound's library now at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the only other secondary studies of the American Revolutionary period are two books by Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1935; first published, 1913) and Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York: Macmillan, 1936; first published, 1915), with notations by Pound throughout. Woodward refers admiringly to Beard's work and may have directed Pound's attention to him. Beard's general stress on the economic basis of the politics surrounding the debates over the Constitution and his focus on the key role played by debt in the period would certainly have been grist for Pound's mill, though Beard's defense of the necessity of Hamilton's prodebt politics and his discussion of the opposition between Adams and Jefferson would not have been congenial to Pound. As Pound's copies are 1935 and 1936 editions, however, they could not have played a formative role in Pound's portrait of Jefferson; he does refer to Beard in some of his World War II radio speeches and in Canto 84. Neither his editions of Adams or Jefferson are in the Texas collection, only a single volume of Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (Philadelphia: H. C. Carey & I. Lea, 1825). His edition of Jefferson is in Pound's daughter's collection in Italy (see Tim Redman, “Pound's Library: A Preliminary Catalog,” Paideuma 15 [Fall & Winter 1986]: 226); The University of Toledo has just announced its acquisition of “EP's own 10-volume set of The Works of John Adams” (Paideuma 16 [Spring & Fall 1987]: 286).
-
See “The Jefferson-Adams Letters.” One can also see this process at work in his annotations of Beard's volumes at the Ransom Center. The chapter in Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy dealing with “The Great Battle of 1800” between Adams and Jefferson (353-414) is almost completely unmarked in Pound's copy, except for a few references to banks, whereas the previous chapter on “The Politics of Agrarianism” (322-52), with its emphasis on the Jeffersonian critique of the banking interests, is heavily marked and annotated.
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Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (1938; reprint, New York: New Directions, 1970), 254.
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Ezra Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935; reprint, New York: Liveright, 1970), iv; hereafter cited as JM. References will be given parenthetically by page number.
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Nothing comparable to Frederick K. Sanders's John Adams Speaking: Pound's Sources for the Adams Cantos (Orono: Univ. of Maine Press, 1975), which collects Pound's sources for the Adams Cantos in one place, has been done for Jefferson, though Philip Furia discusses the documents that make their way into this section of the Cantos (Pound's Cantos Declassified [University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1984], 51-63).
-
Jefferson and/or Mussolini was written in 1933 and published in 1935. Canto 21 was first published as part of A Draft of the Cantos 17-27 in 1928, and these were then incorporated in A Draft of XXX Cantos in 1930. Cantos 31-33 were published in Pagany in 1931, and then were published as part of Eleven New Cantos in 1934.
-
Ezra Pound, The Cantos (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), Canto 21, page 97. Further quotations from the Cantos refer to this edition and will be cited parenthetically by canto number and page number: 21/97.
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This parallel has already been noted by Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971), 376, 423-24.
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Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (1929; reprint, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), 21-142.
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See, as well as the pages in Kenner cited above (note 11), Clark Emery, Ideas into Action: A Study of Pound's Cantos (Coral Gables: Univ. of Miami Press, 1958), 34-35, and Pearlman (note 1), 142.
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Pearlman builds an interpretation of the whole of this section of the Cantos on Malatesta's motto, 142-51.
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J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), 539. For the central statement of the Lockean paradigm, see Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (1922; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1958), 24-79. Pocock implicitly criticizes this view throughout The Machiavellian Moment; for an explicit critique, see Garry Wills, Inventing America (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1978), 168-75, passim.
-
Wills, Inventing America, 182-292.
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Though Pocock spends very little time actually discussing Jefferson, his portrait of Revolutionary America establishes a context for Jefferson.
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How to translate virtù is a major dilemma for English translators of Machiavelli. Mark Musa devotes a third of his introduction to the problem, listing the fifty-nine times the word appears in The Prince. He uses twelve different words to translate virtù, using virtue only three times. See Mark Musa, trans. and ed., Machiavelli's The Prince: A Bilingual Edition (New York: St. Martin's, 1964), x-xv. For Hanna Pitkin's sense of the meaning of virtù, see note 21 below.
-
I should specify here that I am not so much arguing for the direct influence of Machiavelli on Pound as suggesting that Machiavelli theorizes about a political practice Pound already knew directly through his knowledge of the Italian Renaissance. It is not that Pound saw Malatesta through Machiavelli's eyes as much as that Machiavelli usefully summarizes for us what Pound saw in a figure like Malatesta. We do know, however, that Pound owned and used Machiavelli's Istorie fiorentine, as it was his source for Canto 21 and a copy of it (Torino: G. B. Paravia, 1924) annotated by Pound is in the Pound library at the University of Texas. It is also relevant that Pound's two closest literary friends and allies in the 1920s, Wyndham Lewis and T. S. Eliot, were both writing about Machiavelli at this time. See T. S. Eliot, “Niccolò Machiavelli,” in For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928), 49-66, and “Niccolò Machiavelli,” Times Literary Supplement (June 16, 1927): 413-14; and Wyndham Lewis, The Lion and the Fox: The role of the hero in the plays of Shakespeare (1927; reprint, London: Methuen, 1966). Pound would have known his Machiavelli.
-
“Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of World War II, ed. Leonard W. Doob (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978), 112; hereafter cited as EPS. Further references will be given parenthetically by page number.
-
See also Ezra Pound, “Cavalcanti,” originally published in Make it New (1934); reprinted in Literary Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968), 152, 155-56. Hanna Pitkin's contention that the fundamental meaning of virtù is manliness is relevant here, as Pound's conception of energy was always, as one says today, phallocentric, and his appreciation of the “manly” energy in the Italian Renaissance from Cavalcanti to Malatesta was an important part of his cult of the Italian Renaissance. See Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), 25.
-
It should be noted, however, that the original meaning of virtue in English was fairly close to Pound's usage. The first definition in the OED is “the power or operative influence inherent in a supernatural or divine being.” Secularized, this sounds much like Machiavelli's virtù, though the English word derives more from the French than from the Italian. And the second “vertu” in Canto 36 may be spelled this way to bring out this Renaissance sense of the word. Virtue or virtù was a key word for Pound for many years: for a rather different, earlier Poundian use of the word, see “On Virtue,” in “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris,” originally published in The New Age, 1911-1912; reprinted in Ezra Pound, Selected Prose 1909-1965, ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1973), 28-31; and James Longenbach's discussion in Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987), 55-61.
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J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), 109.
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Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, 98.
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Peter Nicholls has a good discussion of Pound's brief dialogue with Marxism in the 1920s; see his Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing: A Study of The Cantos (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1984), 47-59. The various prefaces to Jefferson and/or Mussolini record Pound's brief interest in and subsequent disillusionment with Roosevelt.
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Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (1927; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 40.
-
This is where Pound's and Lewis's politics diverge, for Lewis never went past the stage of provocative pro-Fascist remarks made on the principle (later understood by Lewis to be false) that Fascism couldn't be worse—and might well be better—than the status quo.
-
It would take another essay to discuss Aristotle's considerable influence on Pound's political thinking in these years (a subject I hope to treat elsewhere). Briefly, Aristotle lines up with Confucius and Dante as theoreticians of order, of chung. For Aristotle on the one, the few and the many, see the Politics 3.5.1. ff. Pound's copy of Aristotle's Politics (with an English translation by H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library [London: Heinemann, 1932]) is at Texas. See also Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 66-80 and passim.
-
The Machiavellian Moment, 531.
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Sanders (note 8), 426.
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In an interesting contemporary parallel, Irving Babbitt begins his Democracy and Leadership (1924; reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside, 1962), which is committed to arguing essentially the same proposition, with a quotation from an Adams letter to Jefferson of 1815 warning about the possibility of a despotism of the majority in a popular assembly.
-
This comes from a speech broadcast to England, not to the United States, which accounts for the reference to Parliament.
-
Sanders, 456. This passage is the source for a passage on 70/413. The declaration quoted above is also on 456.
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