SOURCE: Goldensohn, Barry. “Pound and Antisemitism.” Yale Review 75, no. 3 (June 1986): 399-421.

[In the following essay, Goldensohn disagrees with the various rationales often given for Pound's anti-Semitism and that despite the historical tendencies to forgive and forget such indiscretions, Pound's anti-Semitism continues to matter.]

It is a puzzling and painful conflict for one who loves Pound's poetry and poetics and admires his role as a generous mentor of poets to attempt to come to terms with his antisemitism, his Fascism, and his glorification of Mussolini (the “Boss”) and Hitler (“a Jeanne d'Arc”).¹ We do not have here a romantic figure of the artist-in-defiance choosing evil or crime like Genet, Rimbaud, or Sade; nor on the other hand do we have here the poet as mass murderer like Sir Walter Ralegh, who in a “pacification campaign” in Ireland is said to have massacred six hundred men and women after their surrender. What repels us in Pound is banal and self-righteous. We have come to understand antisemitism as the all-too-common form of the paranoid fantasy of the credulous, and it does not sit well with Pound's early work: his essays and poetry reveal an ironic, iconoclastic, skeptical intelligence—that of a latter-day Archilochus or Martial set loose in London and Paris, or of a man at home with the alluring, sophisticated mockery of Propertius. This aspect of Pound violates our sense of the coherence of his personality since the antisemitic mind ordinarily dwells below the level of self-awareness required for discourse, projecting a single, simple cause for all evil, all mischance.

I have heard many strategies used to explain away Pound's antisemitism and thereby to make sense of this conflict, this contradiction in his life. At a recent Christmas dinner at the MacDowell Colony I asked a distinguished Pound scholar how one dealt with this and was told, “Pound is not an antisemite. To him the Jews just symbolized the international control of capital and the media.”

“But that is antisemitism,” I said. “Wouldn't you consider anti-Catholic the sort of thing that was said during the Smith and Kennedy campaigns, that Catholicism symbolized spiritual enslavement to the Vatican?”

“Oh, Barry, that's entirely different. Catholics aren't like that!”

This was a spontaneous and thoughtless response—a considered one would surely have been different—but it reveals the blindness to antisemitism that goes along with the argument that it is merely symbolism. Antisemitism cannot be understood as merely the hatred of individual Jews (Pound had a few Jewish friends and admired a few Jewish artists and intellectuals), but as a body of doctrine about a religion, its followers, or the members of a “race”—the intellectual vogue term that was applied to everyone and everything after the birth of anthropology at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It should be clear that the use of key doctrines of antisemitism to symbolize Jews is itself antisemitic, and one could argue further that the use of any group to symbolize something is an ominous act of appropriation of meaning, as some feminists have insisted. (I offered the same mistaken defense of Pound in an undergraduate paper thirty years ago and the professor responded: “For the Jew as a symbol see Ulysses.” I felt that the argument of my paper had been answered.)

Pound's antisemitism is often explained away as part of the commonplace snobbery of his class and time. This profoundly mistakes both the nature of Pound's antisemitism and the transformation of the meaning of antisemitism during the Nazi era. Defending Eliot in 1948, Orwell wrote:

Of course you can find anti-semitic remarks in his early work, but who wasn't saying such things at that time? One has to draw a distinction between what was said before and after 1934. … In the early twenties, Eliot's anti-semitic remarks were about on a par with the automatic sneer one casts at Anglo-Indian colonels in boarding houses.

Pound's antisemitism began as mere sneering—that's what it was in the 1920s—but in the 1930s it turned into a theory about the Jewish conspiracy to destroy the world's economy, corrupt the purity of the European races, commercialize art, and so on, and it intensified during the Jewish persecutions by the Nazis in the mid-1930s, the line beyond which, according to Orwell, the sneering was no longer innocent. During the Nazi era, first with the use of antisemitism as a political tool, then during the “mobile killing operations” in eastern Europe, and last with the creation of the extermination camps as the ultimate step in the “final solution,” meanings changed. Antisemitism was transformed by the full resources of the modern state: it became genocide, legalized, bureaucratized, industrialized. No longer a mere prejudice—a policy of exclusion designed to preserve the structure of a class system, or a church's way of creating religious conformity—antisemitism became a modern political weapon of unthinkable destructiveness by becoming an official act, executed with the “rational” organization and technology of the state. That Pound stayed an antisemite even after the war carries him a terrifying distance beyond snobbery.

His antisemitism is often explained away as a symptom of madness. This is an improvement over the previous two evasions, because at least it recognizes that the antisemitism was there, and was serious. However, no one seriously argues that Pound was psychotic. We should be glad that the government went along with the flimsy case his lawyer and the sympathetic psychiatrists presented and did not execute him for treason. Nothing of value needed another corpse in tribute. The trial would have concerned treason—not antisemitism or being a Fascist or Nazi sympathizer.

But there is something mad about this thirty- or forty-year-long obsession: Pound often seems helpless in its grip, a highly intelligent man with the crudest of conspiracy theories to account for all problems, his and the world's. The above use of “mad” is not the legal or medical one. In an entirely colloquial sense of the word, we recognize more kinds of erratic behavior than the forensic judgment about insanity and responsibility for action. And that his antisemitism was erratic and an obsession seems hardly possible to doubt.

Moreover, the Jews provided Pound with a more “coherent” source of wrong as he pursued his quest for coherence in The Cantos. This was especially true after he became an enthusiastic follower of C. H. Douglas's social credit theories and shared his conviction that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion explained the Western world's economic troubles as a Jewish plot, just as Thaddeus Zielinski's The Sibyl explained its religious and cultural ills. To rely on a patent forgery concocted by the Czarist police from French and German antisemitic tracts that was exposed in the London Times right after its publication in English in 1920, and on a book of crank scholarship that derived the “essential” Christianity from Greek and Roman mystery religions and denounced Judaism as its corrupter, may strike us as deluded. But the acceptance of spurious sources has never been confined to psychotics. Despite Douglas's interest in the Protocols, social credit was not a crank theory; it attracted serious support. Pound wrote brilliantly in the twenties and thirties. But obsessions are blinding: Pound was blind, not insane. This is not an uncommon state of affairs, especially with poets. We do not go to poets for the civic virtues, their balanced judgments, their respectability, their niceness. They may fall into the class of special beings that we love but do not like. This is not of course an apology, but a reminder of the psychic territory we are concerned with here.

The closest thing to a real diagnosis of Pound during his thirteen years at St. Elizabeths (the official cover was “undifferentiated psychosis”) was that he was suffering from a “narcissistic personality disorder,” which may suggest things about his egotism, his tendency to project evil, and his preference for knowledge that is unique, discrete, direct, and that stems from a truth-producing rapport. This narcissistic epistemology is close to Pound's notion of the “periplum”—the journey as known by one on shipboard as opposed to knowledge of the route gained from chart or map. The knowing self is the center. However, this explains little about all that is reflective, uncertain, open, unpredictable, and changing in Pound's poetry—all qualities that are antithetical to narcissism. Easy labels degrade complex personalities, and Pound—especially in his work—is nothing if not complex.

Pound's antisemitism is often explained away with an appeal to the long view. After all, we no longer care deeply whether Dante was a Guelph or a Ghibelline, that Swift was a Tory, or that Milton served Cromwell. The passion of partisanship has faded, it is argued, and it will with antisemitism also. But this isn't the case yet, nor is it easy to foresee. Antisemitism itself hasn't gone away. It may be too deeply rooted in the languages and intellectual and emotional habits of the West ever to vanish fully, and the long view is not a stance morally possible to us now. We can only stand appalled. Marlowe's antisemitism in The Jew of Malta remains disturbing, and the best we can honestly say about Shylock is that Shakespeare characteristically sees him as more human, in an extraordinary moment of sympathy that is an enormous advance over Marlowe. But there is much in the portraits of Barabas (“a sound Machiavill”) and Shylock that will continue to be offensive.

I doubt that it matters much now that Pound was opposed to Roosevelt and Churchill, and perhaps even that he supported Mussolini. But his grounds for opposing them—his conviction that Churchill and Roosevelt were the agents of the Jewish conspiracy—and his support of Hitler's Rassenpolitik will continue to matter. Time might well absolve him of treason, but it cannot alter the contents of the propaganda broadcasts that he made for the Fascist government from 1941 until the fall of Mussolini in 1943.

Though Pound was accumulating antisemitic ideas in the 1920s, he kept them largely out of his published work. He edited them out of the poems from Blast for inclusion in Personae (1926), the collected shorter poems, and they are hardly in evidence in A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930). But in the turmoil of the 1930s antisemitic material began to enter his work. It was a hard time for Pound's poetic reputation. He felt neglected and ignored. What role this had in the growth of his antisemitism is hard to say with any precision, though he complained about the Jewish press lords keeping him out of their pages. Armchair psychoanalysis is at best a risky enterprise; still, we can be reasonably sure that this habitually non-introspective man would be likely to project onto others his chilly reception by the bitch goddess. But it is not very hard to imagine the general political panic of that decade, the desperate fears that produced its rage for order, the belief in schemes of salvation and in strong men. If we had now a vivid belief that another world war was imminent and inevitable, and imagined it, as people in the thirties did, to be of unthinkable technological destructiveness—large bombers, large bombs—we would find it easy to understand the widespread search for a political and economic order that would prevent it. This was especially acute for anyone in England during the Great War who felt the enormity of the losses.

It is in this light that we must view the belief in strong leaders—even in the United States, a liberal democracy, we overwhelmingly elected Roosevelt to four terms in office, and likewise in Britain the unthinkable Churchill was called up. The enthusiasm shown for Stalin, Mussolini, and even Hitler seems less bizarre when seen in the context of the thirties. It was the era of total solutions: Pound lodged there and stuck. It suited his economic theories—he was convinced that Mussolini's, and later Hitler's, policies were close to Douglas's theories—and the idea of a total order fit in with his search for an all-encompassing vision for The Cantos. Pound never had the saving self-doubt and skepticism that kept his friends from the worst excesses of simple ideas. We need only look at the habitual tone he took in his essays and even in his best work to realize what authority meant to him. He always preferred pronouncement to argument.

The Rome broadcasts, printed in “Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of World War II (the most complete collection we are likely to have), elaborate these ideas very fully and throw a sobering light on The Cantos because they overcome our reasonable resistance to believing that he actually means what he says. For example, in Canto 90 (1955) we find the powerful and aphoristic lines, “not arrogant from habit / but furious from perception,” that describe a kind of prophetic vision in sharp and suggestive opposition to the ecstatic and ethical vision that is one of Pound's central themes, “UBI AMOR, IBI OCULUS EST” (where there is love, there is vision). As the gauzy lines that precede it come into focus, we find an idea that the broadcasts have prepared us to recognize—that it is not Pound alone but Hitler as well who is rejuvenated by the Sibyl:

Castalia like the moonlight
                                                  and the waves rise and fall,
Evita, beer-halls, semina motuum,
                                                  to parched grass, now is rain
not arrogant from habit,
                    but furious from perception,
                                                                                                                                  Sibylla,
from under the rubble heap
                                                                                                    m'elevasti. …

This passage celebrates renewal and the cycle of return. It brings together the muses' spring (Castalia), Eva Braun, Evita Perón (who renewed Peronism), the beer-hall Putsch, the Confucian élan vital in a Jesuit Latin translation, and the prophetic Sibyl (Zielinski's antisemitic symbol). Then Pound puts Dante's thankful words to Beatrice—m'elevasti (you have lifted me up)—in the mouth of the defeated visionary raised up from the destruction of Europe. In case we missed the connection in this chopped tribute, we are reminded in a coda passage in Canto 104 that it is “Adolf, furious from perception.” Hitler, dressed in this spiritual habit, is so decorative! The muses, the transcendent love-light of Paradiso, Beatrice, and the chinoiserie of waves rising and falling in the moonlight, parched grass in rain—this kind of prettified political hagiography is kitsch. However, it was a fierce act of defiance for Pound to publish this kind of praise of Hitler in 1955, so we should not call it simply political kitsch. Rather, it is cult kitsch, veiled by the characteristically dropped noun which would enable us to identify its subject by name, not merely by his attributes.

The problems in reading this passage are characteristic of the difficulty we have with Pound's vague and evasive style: not only are the images encrypted and private, but the associative syntax is designed to conceal thought. (In Pound's poetics, the use of “language to conceal thought” is a cardinal sin.) The reason for this particular evasion has to be seen in Pound's attempt to get the charge of treason dropped so that he could be released from St. Elizabeths. Praise of Hitler would not have helped. The lines “not arrogant from habit, / but furious from perception” can exist as an independent syntactical unit that refers to the particular soul being elevated (“Adolf, furious from perception”) or they can modify “Sibylla.” Reno Odlin, who was part of the Pound circle at St. Elizabeths, informs me that “arrogant from habit” refers to John Kasper's girlfriend and “furious from perception” refers to Pound's protégée-muse Sheri Martinelli. Read this way, the lines would make sense modifying “Sibylla” by apposition. But in the kind of phrasal construction we have in this passage and in much of The Cantos, apposition remains syntactically ambiguous and the grammatical function of particular phrases is deliberately imprecise in order to be broadly suggestive—and also to be deliberately vague. Odlin told me (confirmed by his notes of the time) that as Pound was reading aloud from Canto 87, he stopped after the line “Butchers of lesser cattle, their villain the grain god,” looked up, and said, “That's a way to get by the kikes.” Here “the kikes” are some of the doctors passing judgment on his mental state and also the conspiracy that was keeping him confined. The goal was getting the message to the initiates; obscurity was his protection.

But the Rome broadcasts should not be read uncritically as a guide to the poems. We must recognize that they are propaganda, written and delivered as such, and therefore not in any direct way a measure of what Pound thinks and feels, but only of what he is willing to say. That too is a measure, but at one remove, and of something essentially instrumental. Pound insisted that no one interfered with his broadcasts and that he was speaking his own mind. There is no reason to doubt this. But the medium is one that insists on slogans, exaggeration of effect, simplification; and the candor and sincerity of the speaker are part of the artifice in this medium—a fiction of tone.

When Pound quotes Lincoln and Jefferson on money and repeats antisemitic comments by Chesterton and Carlyle, he says to his audience that they know that couldn't be Axis propaganda, indicating that he is aware of how he himself was heard. He often refers to Axis (as opposed to Fascist) propaganda, and for good reason: he praises Hitler and his policies frequently, and in Italy during the war the alliance with Hitler was not popular, even among Fascists. Italy placed little emphasis on antisemitism. Measures against the Jews were passed to convince the Nazis that the Italians were serious partners in the Axis, but though severe enough to disrupt Jewish life, the Italian measures were considerably milder than the German ones: they were not aimed at imprisonment or extermination and were full of exceptions. Furthermore, they were only intermittently enforced. Mussolini refused to expel Jews from the Fascist party, and while in power protected Italian Jews in German custody. After the fall of Mussolini, when the Nazis took over Italy, seven-eighths of the Jews were hidden and protected by their fellow Italians. Pound's antisemitism may well have been tolerated and supported by the Propaganda Ministry as one of those measures taken to convince the Germans that they were serious. The Propaganda Ministries worked closely together and some of Pound's broadcasts were replayed over Radio Berlin.

They are difficult to read through. The vituperation is relentless, repetitive, and the voice goes on and on like a broken machine you can't stop—noisy, grinding, destructive. They are painful for me to read, but they must be agony for men like James Laughlin and Hugh Kenner who knew him and cared for him. “I am not arguing with you. I am just telling you,” he says a few times, quoting James McNeill Whistler. That is his own method: to tell, to pronounce. The antisemitism in the broadcasts seems at times calculating, at times out of control. In an early broadcast Pound says:

There has even come up the term “UNamerican” used by asinine females and tinhorn employees of Jewsfelt [Roosevelt] to define ANY man, woman or child who isn't ready to chuck away and destroy every last vestige of the AMERICAN heritage.

They git that way reading Jew papers for 40 years. They git that way hearin' kike radio, and I propose to use the word KIKE regardless of race. Use it to cover honorary Jews, AND TO EXCEPT honest Jews when we find 'em.

[1941]

What a mass of contradiction this is. In a gesture that he announces as rising above “picking on minorities,” he proposes the use of an insulting term for “Jew” as a symbol of all evil, after repeatedly using “Jew” derogatorily. This is in line with a number of disclaimers made in the broadcast that distinguish the “high-kikes” from the average Jews, and also with a number of comments from his writings in the thirties. He says in the Guide to Kulchur (1938):

The red herring is the scoundrel's device and the usurer's stand-by. … Race prejudice is a red herring. The tool of the man defeated intellectually, and of the cheap politician. … It is nonsense for the anglo-saxon to revile the Jew for beating him at his own game.

In the New English Weekly he writes (April 1935):

Taking it impartially as a transpontine Confucian I fail to see why the Jews should commit race suicide merely because Aryans can't think clearly. And I still more emphatically fail to see why any Jew should be expected to think so.

A few months later Pound wrote:

Usurers have no race. How long the Jewish people is to be sacrificial goat for the usurer I know not. …

It cannot be too clearly known that no man can take usury and observe the law of the Hebrews. No orthodox Jew can take usury without sin, as defined in his own scriptures.

The Jew usurer being an outlaw runs against his own people and uses them as whipping boy. …

But the Jew is the usurer's goat. Whenever a usurer is spotted he scuttles down under the ghetto and leaves the plain man Jew to take the bullets and the beating.

All hostilities are grist to the usurer. All racial hate wears down sales resistance on cannon.

What makes this opposition to antisemitism hard to swallow is that all the usurers seem to be Jews by the end of the last selection; the Jews are then ultimately responsible for bringing “the bullets and the beating” on themselves, rich Jew on poor Jew. Even so, this is a great distance from the antisemitism of the broadcasts. We know very little about this shift in Pound's thinking. Either it represents a genuine change of heart or a cynical use of antisemitic material by a man who knew better. In The Fifth Decade of Cantos (1937) the Jewish usurers take a beating. We even see Bismarck blame Rothschild for causing the American Civil War. But the emphasis is entirely on the usurer and not on the “race” in The Cantos up to this point. In the later Cantos the usurers are more consistently identified with the Jews. The 1941 broadcast cited above ends with the following comment, intended to discourage American participation in the war with the suggestion that it would benefit the Jews alone and would hurt other nationalities in the melting pot:

You can't go to war without small meanness to SOME of the neighbors. You get het up over the sorrows of Mrs. Ikestein, the tailor's wife; you can't DO anything about it without doin' dirt to Giovanni the grocer, and the Hungarian livin' next door, or the grandson of R. Schuz's old friend who sells delicatessen.

This, of course, is cynical blame of the Jews. Pure Propaganda Ministry stuff: divide and conquer. (According to Leonard W. Doob, the editor of the broadcasts, it is a standard tactic of wartime propaganda.)

Pound came to Rome from Rapallo for one week every month to work on the broadcasts, to record a few at a time in the Propaganda Ministry. (They aired three times a week.) What we know about these places is that they boil over with rumor and inside information, and while it is impossible to say with certainty what Pound knew or didn't know, there are things in the broadcasts that suggest that he is responding to rumors, if not hard news, about the extermination of Jews. After the invasion of Russia in the summer of 1941, the “mobile killing operations” began the mass execution of Jews in eastern Europe, and in January 1942, Hitler changed the policy for the “final solution” to the creation of extermination camps. Instead of the executioners going out in search of their victims, which created panic and encouraged flight, the victims would be rounded up peacefully and sent to the executioners. This policy shift, designed at the notorious ministerial conference at Wannsee, was accompanied by the “whispering campaign” about “sending Jews up the chimney” on the calculation that it would unite Germany with a bond of secret guilt. Four months after the conference, Pound broadcast the following to the United States:

Don't start a pogrom. That is, not an old style killing of small Jews. That system is no good whatsoever. Of course if some man had a stroke of genius and could start a pogrom UP AT THE top, there might be something to say for it.

But on the whole legal measures are preferable. The sixty Kikes who started this war might be sent to St. Helena as a measure of world prophylaxis. And some hyper-kike, or non-Jewish kikes along with 'em.

[30 April 1942]

This seems like Pound's reservations about the “final solution,” but the reservations did not stop the antisemitic diatribes. In the transcript of another broadcast we read:

The Bolshevik anti-morale comes out of the Talmud, which is the dirtiest teaching any race ever codified. The Talmud is the one and only begetter of the Bolshevik system.

… And the Chronicles record the doings of a thoroughly disgusting race of barbarians. …

That is BASIC; all particular grafts and swindles over Army contracts, or contracts in peace time are EXTRA, over and above the main wheeze. I leave out all questions of detail, questions as to what Moses learned in Egypt, what the kikes picked up in Babylon. I ask you WHY WAS CHRIST crucified? He was crucified for trying to BUST a racket.

… Meet a few of Baruch's importation, of Warburg's importation, meet the lower strata. … Meet a few of these dirty swine out to destroy Bach's music.

Bach? OUT.

Shakespeare? OUT.

Destroy everything that is conducive to civilization. Damn civilization. The Kike is out for all power. … And SECURELY against all that is decent in America. Against the total American heritage. This is my war all right. I have been in it for 20 years. My Grandad was in it before me.

[4 May 1942]

Whatever reservations Pound expressed in April 1942, the antisemitic message continued until the fall of Mussolini, when the broadcasts ended. The horrifying thing about these broadcasts is not that they encouraged the Nazi extermination policy—the Nazis needed no encouragement—but that they justified it by trumpeting the nature of the Jewish threat. His reservations about the “final solution,” given what continued to follow, seem as empty a gesture as the disclaimer that preceded his broadcasts after Pearl Harbor: “He will not be asked to say anything that goes against his conscience, or anything incompatible with his duties as a citizen of the United States.” The broadcasts aim at undermining the resistance of the citizens of the United States and the United Kingdom by addressing them as follows: Your governments are in the hands of Jews, who are exploiting them for their own purposes; Jews control publishing and the media and have suppressed and perverted historical fact; Jewish politicians and bankers have dragged you into a war that they created for their own profit; Jews are destroying your governments, just as they destroyed that of France—and only Germany knew how to resist the Jewish peril. Regarding his “duties as an American citizen,” it should be pointed out that all of these things were being said by antisemites in the United States, and probably had greater credibility at home than when heard over Rome Radio. Ironically, hearing this sort of stuff over Rome Radio might well have undercut the credibility of the home-grown product, so the notion of aid and comfort to the enemy in this medium has strange and self-defeating limits.

As offensive as the broadcasts are to read—and much of this essay is a reaction to the shock of reading them—it is hard to imagine the kind of material that follows as being persuasive enough to convert anyone. The following selections do not suggest all of Pound's ideas in the broadcasts nor the crazy tone of his name-calling, but are chosen to show the ideology of his antisemitism. I have quoted at length because it is the only way to convey their obsessive quality. They may be the most shameful and terrifying texts ever produced by a poet of genius. That the broadcasts were published at all reflects the rich ambivalence of the Pound legacy. There is no doubt that they were published to set the record straight, and in that gesture is much of what is admirable in Pound—his convictions about not distorting history, not hiding the truth, ensuring accuracy, revering verbal precision. All of these ideas seem painfully out of place here:

But that any sub-Jew in the White House should send American lads to die for their Jewsoons and Sassoons and the private interest of the skum of the English earth, and the still lower dregs of the Parsee and levantine importations is an outrage. …

[19 February 1942. The Sassoons are a wealthy and prominent family of English Jews]

Waaal, can't get it all into one discourse. But if there is still some campus not yet invaded by the hosts of Belial and Jewry, not wholly squashed under the dung-flow … I suggest you start taking notes and figures. Figure out this affair of the ruin of language, the falsification of all reports in the well paid magazines, the falsification of newsprint. And ALSO the attack on historic knowledge. The rise of TALMUDIC schools, quite UNNOTICED by the high class periodicals. Note when America began to be filled with talmudic schools, not listed and having big sign boards. Note when America began to be filled with talmudic schools, history went out of fashion. When the kids in the lower grades heard of Lenin and Marx and Trotsky, and not so much of Lincoln and Washington.

[13 April 1942]

England has chosen birth control INSTEAD of Eugenics.

You could see that 30 years ago, and then they went to breeding fool-blooded greyhounds and whiffets, not even farm edible farm stock, INSTEAD of trying to make human thoroughbreds.

[10 May 1942]

I was behindhand in readin' Mein Kampf, but do you YET know what is IN it? …

Now what were, and are, the THREE planks of the Hitler program … ?

First, HEALTH, health of the race. … That means EUGENICS: as opposed to race suicide. And it did not and does NOT please the Talmudic Jews who want to kill off ALL the other races whom they can not subjugate. …

SECONDLY, what is the second point of the Hitler program? Personal responsibility. A political system in which you can't pass the buck. [Given the Nuremberg defense, this is resonant with ironies.]

… Hitler, having seen the Jew puke in the German democracy, was out for responsibility, government officials etc. to be RESPONSIBLE for their acts. MOST unpleasant for Monds, Warburgs, invisible de facto Jew governments.

And the THIRD point was a STUDY of history. …

Waaal, now WHAT does this program CONTRADICT? I ask you, if you are such low down and gol darn suckers … as NOT to know what program this contradicts [the Jewish conspiracy]. … And when you, or if you do trace it, you may see why the stick screen was erected, and why people began to speak evil of Hitler.

[18 May 1942]

For all his hate-mongering, it is possible to think that Pound believes what he says in the above excerpts, particularly in his account of the Hitler program. However, his use of the Protocols in the broadcasts is cynical and shameless, especially for one who habitually dramatizes himself as the last champion of intellectual integrity. He obviously knew they were forgeries.

Absolute indifference to fact. Blind and supine adhesion to the WORST of the point in the protocols of the so-called elders of so-called Zion. Whoever wrote 'em shows in this policy. The author of that filthy perverted work has given away several shows. Amongst 'em the aim of obscuring all history.

[4 June 1942]

If or when one mentions the Protocols alleged to be of the Elders of Zion, one is frequently met with the reply: Oh, but they are a forgery.

Certainly they are a forgery, and that is the one proof we have of their authenticity. The Jews have worked with forged documents for the past 24 hundred years, namely ever since they had any documents whatsoever. …

Is it possible to arouse any interest in verbal precision?

[20 April 1943]

… BEWARE of folks who lump things under one label. … The reason why the JEW has been able to wreck one European country after another is that the ploots, the nobility, the better classes, the NICE people in those countries were always ready to borrow money. And that the whole of life in our time has been run by people who were collectin' interest on money.

[25 July 1942]

The following comments on race are a mixture of Nazi dogma, Pound's own beliefs, and stuff intended to be divisive in the United States. As late as the fifties, Pound was seeking confirmation of his racial theories in those of Laurence Austine Waddell, who believed that the aryans had founded Western civilization. The confusion of race and nationality in these broadcasts is deliberate and cynical:

… the inhabitants of the United States can organize on ONE basis only, namely that on which Europe has finally been constrained to organize its rebellion against the pervasive, the ubiquitous Yidd. Pacts may be signed between the Pennsylvania Deitsch, the scrawny New Englander of British or Anglo-Scotch origin, but on no basis save that of race, and of allied or more or less consanguineous races can you cohere.

You have, as opposed to any such projected order not merely the 4 or 8 million kikes in New York and points penetrated already.

[2 July 1942]

The continent is a few decades ahead, France is in decay, the French have been studying the effect of Jews on France for over 50 years. Germans found out what it meant, reacted, serious STUDY of the Jew AS problem.

No longer haphazard programs. Serious study of what Dr. [Harold] Laski means, I don't mean what Laski tells you, but of the phenomena, PENETRATION by Talmudic tendencies, bacillae carried by a particular hostile, but whining race, humiliation doctrine. … None of your Christianity conceived as intense luminous thought.

[12 July 1942]

The defense of Hitler's firmness and the facetious dismissal of his cruelty in dealing with the Jews are themes that appear frequently in the broadcasts. Pound also jokes about British and American faintheartedness and he accuses the Americans of preferring the cowardly lynch law to strong “political violence” and “political revery” that would allow them to act on his antisemitic analysis of American history. These broadcasts seem directly to contradict the argument that Pound was ignorant of the Nazi extermination policy:

I have heard Brit and Yit propaganda so foul in these weeks that it has given me nausea. Irrelevant flimflam.

Little Johnnie threw the kitten out of the window, and when his ma went to smack him he ran away and fell up the stairs, and his nose got all bloody, and it bled all over his pinafore; isn't that CREWEL? Ain't Hitler just awful?

[20 July 1942]

[To Britain] DON'T start a pogrom [bis]. The problem is not insoluble. Don't start a pogrom; the problem, the Chewisch problem, is not insoluble. Don't start a pogrom; SELL 'em Australia. Don't go out and die in the desert for high kikery.

[21 March 1943]

I think it is time that American Masons developed a curiosity about the possible relations of their order to Jewry, as such. …

I think it might be a good thing to hang Roosevelt and a few hundred yidds IF you can do it by due legal process, NOT otherwise. Law must be preserved. I know this may sound tame, but so is it. It is sometimes hard to think so. Hard to think that the 35 ex-army subalterns or whatever who wanted to bump off all the kike congressmen weren't just a bit crude and simpliste. Sometimes one feels that it would be better to get the job done somehow, ANYhow, than to delay execution.

[27 April 1943]

The Jew is behind you, but you cannot blame it all on the Jew, though you are the Jew's most damned accomplice. Above all you cannot blame [it] at all on the small Jew; for he is in most cases as damned a fool and as witless a victim as you are, [he is] the shock troop, the below the starvation line; starvation line, below which there is NO morality.

[16 May 1943]

To die not knowin' why is to die like an animal. What the kike calls you: goyim or cattle.

[1943]

That [historical] perspective is very clearly outlined or indicated in a book called La Sibille, by Zielinski, a Polish writer who seems to me to be imbued with sincere piety. But who sees Judaism in direct contrast, spiritual, theological contrast, with the Christian faith.

… He speaks of the psychologic preparation for Christianity that was there in the Greek and Roman religions, both the religion of Delphi, that is of the cult of Apollo, and in that of Ceres Demeter, Mater Dolorosa. …

Few of us know that the Mithraic religion identified their saviour with Love. …

Zielinski offers a fairly complete list of prototypes, of the essentially Catholic beliefs, I say essentially Catholic because they are quite patently NON-Jewish, and ANTI-Jewish, and they are specifically the features of Catholicism which Protestantism has wiped out. …

And Zielinski's term for Protestantism is “REJEWdiazed religion.”

[1941]

Shortly before America entered the war, Pound suggested that the United States exchange Guam for “one set of color and sound films of the 300 best Noh dramas” in order to obtain peace in the Pacific and to raise the level of American culture. It is hard not to laugh at this. But another of Pound's attempts at humor—that the way to end the “Chewisch problem” is not to conduct pogroms but to sell the Jews Australia—is too close to a painful reality: well after the extermination policy was under way, the Nazis were propagating rumors about Jewish resettlement that were designed to prevent or divert resistance.

With the exception of his defense of “the small Jew,” many of Pound's broadcast opinions about the Jews fall into line with Nazi propaganda. What follows is as brief a summary as I can make. (1) The world capitalist and the world communist conspiracies are united in the Jewish plan, which is proved by the fact that Western Jewish capitalists paid for the Russian Revolution. (2) The racial basis for the attack against the Jews is made fundamental. (3) The Jew is characterized as a penetrating disease. (4) The Protocols of the Elders of Zion proves the existence of a Jewish world conspiracy. (5) Hitler's toughness is necessary to rid the world of the Jewish peril. (6) The aryan race must keep itself pure and unite against the Jews. (7) The Jews are uncreative and opposed to genuine culture and art—Wagner's contribution to Nazi ideology. (8) The Jews started the war for their own profit and out of vengeful malice. (9) The Jews lack the ability to respond to the profound, autochthonous religions. This last is connected to a theme that appears throughout the broadcasts and that Sartre, looking at France, describes in these words: “The anti-Semite can conceive only a type of primitive ownership of land based on a veritable magical rapport, in which the thing possessed and the possessor are united by a bond of mystical participation: he is the poet of real property.”

On the evidence of The Cantos—especially the late ones, in which the Jewish economic peril and the vision of Hitler play an integral, if not central, role (Mussolini, who does play a central role, is not presented as an antisemitic figure)—and on the evidence of the recently published letters to John Theobald (Pound/Theobald Letters, 1984), Pound held on to most of these ideas through his thirteen-year confinement in St. Elizabeths. He keeps trying to warn Theobald about the machinations of the “Jewniversities” and the “Jewspapers” and keeps urging the Protocols upon him. Poor Theobald keeps objecting and finally writes: “Some angel in authority ought to prod you to knock it off.” But Pound couldn't knock it off any more than he could before the war when he alienated his old friend William Carlos Williams with his antisemitism. Williams wrote him in 1940: “Why … try to tell me that your whole initiative hasn't been anti-Semitic of recent years? You know damn well it has been so. Tell somebody else such things but don't try it on me if you value the last vestige of what we used to treasure between us.”

The Cantos remain a problem. The antisemitism that they contain is not, of course, their only problem; nevertheless, the way in which we judge them will never be free of it, despite our human need for the provisional but necessary independence of the artistic and the ethical. To put it another way, the ego, against the constrictions of the superego, needs to make an ampler and more human integration. The uneasy conflict between art and morality is thus one of the discontents of civilization and cannot be put aside.

Certainly I am one who has not resolved this problem. There is no way not to be revolted by the propaganda and by the very thought of Pound as an antisemite. And yet I believe that the Anglo-Latin vigor of Homage to Sextus Propertius places it among the masterpieces of poetry in English; I read much of Personae, the early Cantos, and selected later Cantos with pleasure. But when I read the later Cantos in their entirety, I find that I dismiss their antisemitism angrily as malevolent ideological stupidity and then move on without making any apologies for Pound. I am groping around in the broad area between my moral revulsion and my delight in Pound's mastery of language—sometimes in the same passages—to find the words for my profoundly divided feelings when reading The Cantos. One can feel very uncomfortable sporting in this middle ground.

The fact remains that well before Pound's antisemitism seemed any more than the usual sneering (the selections from the Rome broadcasts printed in The Casebook on Ezra Pound in 1958 sounded like milder versions of Westbrook Pegler), he had become very important to me and my generation. The ABC of Reading was my gradus ad Parnassum: it was at once a reading list, a guide to value in poetry (postures and opinions), and the most astute advice I found for good writing. I nearly got kicked off the air for having a friend read Canto 14, one of the Hell Cantos, on my program on the college radio station. It was the “condom full of black-beetles” that caused the ruckus. But it was not only the way Pound lent himself to adolescent rebellion that I value now: it is his essentially lyric gift, the line that surprises, the improbable evocativeness. I'm sorry that his mother urged him to write an epic: he seems to me to be another one of those foxes who felt he should be a hedgehog, and his search for coherence led him from the aestheticism of the “happy few” through the dream of the Total State to the lunatic fringe. Up to the last step, this is not a lonely path.

In the late Cantos we find ideas that are clearly linked in Pound's mind with antisemitism, but they often appear independent of it in the poem. One can certainly have the mystical, participatory bond with the earth that Sartre describes without being an antisemite. We should observe a reasonable caution in reading The Cantos and not see every mention of classical mystery religion, for example, as an antisemitic signal: those cults also have other uses in the poem, even though Pound saw them as anti-Jewish. Everything he liked during that time was anti-Jewish. This also applies to Pound's economic proposals and theories, when their intent to serve the general good is unblemished by denunciations of Jewish usurers. Of course, we can't redeem the glorification of Hitler, who is inextricably associated with antisemitism.

What remains particularly intolerable is the persistence of true antisemitic themes in the postwar Cantos, from The Pisan Cantos on, after the scale of the horror of the Nazi era was fully revealed. In The Pisan Cantos we find:

Nor can who has passed a month in the death cells
                    believe in capital punishment
No man who has passed a month in the death cells
                    believes in cages for beasts. …

Yet along with this announcement of compassion for man and beast we also find the old references to “kikery” and “Pétain defended Verdun while Blum / was defending a bidet”—as if antisemitism were not clearly linked by then to mass extermination, to the barbed wire of the death cells. I doubt that time will blunt the force of Pound's antisemitism in the same way as it has made the political opinions of Virgil, Dante, and Milton less urgent. The moralized history that the literary epics all contain seems eventually to transcend mere partisanship and to become a vision of earthly and heavenly order. Order with “Adolf, furious from perception,” however, does not seem like order. Each new generation of readers returns to the great masters, but I cannot imagine a future generation that will find its own thought in that disorder. And yet it is important to remember that antisemitism is not central to The Cantos, even though it is linked to the conspiracy of usurers, perverters of language, the malevolently stupid, the greedy, and other villains in league against what the poem values: ecstasies, the eighteenth-century American pastoral vision of rational wholeness, the Confucian order that regulates everything political, social, aesthetic, economic, and familial (except male sexual freedom).

In the intense depression and intermittent silences of his final ten years, Pound told various interviewers that he regarded the poem as a botch, that it was marred by incoherence and bad intentions. The agony of these years, as we hear it in the various interviews and accounts now in print, centered on not only painful reappraisal but deep self-rejection. It seems nearly as mysterious and total as Shakespeare's silence in his last years. In Hugh Selwyn Mauberley Pound mocked his own early aestheticism; the older Pound did not merely reverse his previous opinions but seemed to stop, leap off, plunge into utter despair about his life and work. (The strangest reversal was that he turned from a speaker into a listener.) That process of reappraisal is reflected in the short Foreword he wrote for the volume of his Selected Prose just before he died:

The volume would be more presentable had it been possible to remove 80٪ of the sentences beginning with the pronoun ‘I’ and more especially those with ‘we.’

The substitution of ‘I’ by a comprehensive claim in which ‘we’ or ‘one’ is used to indicate a general law may be a pretentious attempt to expand a merely personal view into a universal law.

In sentences referring to groups or races ‘they’ should be used with great care.

re USURY:

I was out of focus, taking a symptom for a cause.

The cause is AVARICE.

There is no agony in this, nor is there any of the excessive self-denunciation that he offered to interviewers and visitors over the preceding decade. It is a cautious and restrained statement that retracts the egotism of his rhetorical posture and his economic oversimplifications; it also severely qualifies his antisemitism. Since these elements are central in his work, we should not be deceived by Pound's restraint: it's as thoroughgoing a retraction in its tight-lipped way as “Michael Henchard's Will” in The Mayor of Casterbridge.

To one worshipful visitor, Allen Ginsberg, he said, “The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of antisemitism.” Peter Viereck faults this statement because it lacks compassion for the Jews. Consider Pound's strange, one-dimensional quality; that self composed of unswerving convictions; his dramatic postures; the absence of profound self-doubt until his last years; the soul that may feel transported but will never be surprised; the choice of Confucius over Buddha and Christ. Why should Viereck expect compassion? Pound is pretty well protected from the Christian virtues, and the virtue called “the greatest of these” echoes in these lines as a sly, charming, irresistible joke:

                                                                      methenamine eases the urine
and the greatest is charity
to be found among those who have not observed
                                                                                                    regulations
                    not of course that we advocate—

It is a sweet moment in The Pisan Cantos: the gratitude for charity, the mockery of Christianity and of his transpontine Confucian self are all unbearably genuine.

Note

1. I do not capitalize the terms semite and aryan (and therefore write antisemitism without a hyphen or a capital letter) since they are pseudoscientific categories in a defunct racial theory. The only tolerable current use of Semitic is to designate a family of languages: anti-Semitism, so written, would be a nonsensical word referring to opposition to Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, and so on. Likewise, the term Aryan refers to the Persian family of Indo-European languages. To capitalize these words outside of a linguistic context would be misleading, since they no longer designate the groups of people intended by the old racial theory. The theory itself survives only in racist thinking.

   In quoted passages I preserve the usage and spelling of the authors.