SOURCE: Coley, Lem. “‘A Conspiracy of Friendliness’: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Allen Tate, and the Bollingen Controversy.” The Southern Review 38, no. 4 (autumn 2002): 809-26.

[In the following essay, Coley summarizes the events surrounding Pound's selection for the Bollingen Award and gives the opinions of many of the leading literary figures of the period and on which side of the debate they fell on.]

In 1948 the Fellows in American Letters of the Library of Congress announced the creation of a new prize for poetry: one thousand dollars for the best book published by an American citizen during the previous year. The prize would be called the Bollingen Award because the Mellon family's Bollingen Foundation was putting up the money. In February 1949, the Fellows announced that Ezra Pound had won the first award for Pisan Cantos.

From its conception and design to its contentious denouement, the first Bollingen Award owed its existence to Allen Tate. He had established the Fellows in American Letters at the Library of Congress—the jury for the award—and nominated the members. He created the prize, raised the money, and spent 1949 as the floor manager of what would be a grand controversy.

Tate and Pound disliked each other. When Ford Madox Ford asked Pound's support for Tate's campaign to keep John Crowe Ransom at Vanderbilt, Ezra carped, “[T]hat gang of southern morons has allus been in opposition to the undersigned SO FAR AS I KNOW.” Tate respected the modernist pioneer, but in 1943 called the Cantos “a chaotic museum of beautiful fragments.”

That judgment appeared in a “Checklist” he put together as Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress for 1943, a post to which he was appointed by Archibald MacLeish. That same year Hemingway wrote MacLeish to know “on what wavelength our old pal Ezra broadcasts.” Pound had been a mentor to Hemingway and to MacLeish, and they didn't want him shot when the Allies invaded Italy. They drew Tate into the correspondence. Such literary business was right up Tate's alley, part of the duty he thought writers owed to the Republic of Letters.

His role as Consultant in Poetry came under the same heading. A conscious activist in the modernist movement, he wanted to raise standards by taking American literature away from journalists and popularizers. Creating the Fellows and attaching them to the Library was a step in that direction.

Tate's ambitious stewardship led him to fill a vacuum at the Library. In 1944 MacLeish resigned as Librarian, and his successor, not a writer, found Tate—often in Washington to see foundation officers—eager to assist with literary matters. When his term as Consultant was over, Tate went on to help pick succeeding Consultants and to keep the Fellows in existence. Indeed, the list of those who followed Tate in the Consultancy testifies to his continuing influence: Robert Penn Warren, Louise Bogan, Karl Shapiro, and Robert Lowell, all Tate friends or protégés. Leonie Adams, the Consultant in 1949, was an old friend. Ex-Consultants became Fellows.

No doubt MacLeish had appointed Tate in recognition of Tate's appetite for literary affairs, but it was an odd choice given their respective positions in the cultural politics of the late '30s and early '40s. MacLeish, along with other liberals and socialists, had supported the Communist Party's Popular Front. When Hitler and Stalin signed their pact, these writers left the Popular Front but continued their progressive activities. MacLeish joined the Roosevelt administration and urged U. S. intervention into the European war; he wanted a war defined as pro-democracy, implying reform at home and anticolonialism abroad. Though he had once declared himself a modernist, MacLeish decided that esthetic detachment was out of place in a world crisis. He published a speech called “The Irresponsibles” that implicated modernism in the rise of Fascism.

This infuriated Tate. In 1943 he had written his liberal friend Mark Van Doren that he wanted America to win, but “It's not my war, never has been, never will be.” He and his friends around Partisan Review compared MacLeish and Van Wyck Brooks to Goebbels and accused them of wanting to control the culture. Tate's poem “To Our Late Proconsuls of the Air” expressed his attitude.

In November 1945, Pound, now indicted for treason, was flown into Washington from a U. S. Army internment camp near Pisa. There, typing fiercely at night in the medical dispensary, he had written the first drafts of the Pisan Cantos. He blustered on arriving that he would be his own lawyer. The Nuremberg trials opened the day after Pound's arraignment, and Lord Haw Haw, with whom Pound had corresponded, was executed before Pound's trial; it was a bad time to try to justify having broadcast for Mussolini, and Pound soon agreed to plead insanity. His lawyer claimed not that Pound had been insane when he made the broadcasts but that after a breakdown induced by the ordeal at Pisa he was not mentally competent to stand trial. In February 1946, Pound was committed to St. Elizabeth's, a federal hospital for the criminally insane.

St. Elizabeth's was a compromise. It would have been awkward to throw a writer of Pound's age and distinction into the cellblock—or to hang him. It would have been equally awkward to release him. And certainly Ezra's claim that he could have prevented the war by expounding Confucius to statesmen—not to mention his dissociative discourse—gave argument for committal. His friends thought he could be quietly let out when things had calmed down.

T. S. Eliot was the most important of those friends. On Eliot's annual trips to the U. S. after the war he met with Tate and others to forward this project. In spring 1946, E. E. Cummings heard from James Laughlin, Pound's student in Rapallo before the war and now his publisher, that Eliot was in New York and “is very anxious to hold a council of strategy of those who are wanting to help Ez. P.” Cummings could not attend the small dinner party, but Laughlin wrote him later: “What we concluded at the council … was that things must be done quietly.”

Tate had counseled Eliot to stress Pound's standing as a man of letters rather than agitate directly for his release. In September 1946, Poetry, with one foot in modernism and one foot in the staid Midwest, published a Pound issue. The centerpiece was an essay by Eliot that presented a fallible comrade, a better judge of poetry than of men. Eliot reminded everyone that there had been a time before the ugly newsreels of the '30s killed modernism's glamor. And in those days of Ulysses, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, In Our Time, Ezra Pound had been Johnny Appleseed. Eliot didn't say that Pound was innocent or should be freed, but he ensured that no one in Poetry's large audience could feel quite so comfortable now calling for Pound's execution.

Friends and enemies of Pound were scattered along a spectrum in 1945 and '46. Literary people who had experienced World War II as a crusade for democracy and a continuation of the progressive movements of the '30s felt that Pound had got off too easy. Writers who identified with modernism and not so strongly with the war saw Pound as persecuted. Not necessarily pro-Fascist or even antidemocratic, they thought Pound had done no real harm, had served his craft; moreover, they suspected political zealotry among poets, having themselves in some cases overdosed during the '30s. As Laughlin wrote to Pound in September 1945: “No one takes your side, of course, in the political sense, but many feel that the bonds of friendship and the values of literature can transcend a great deal.”

Edmund Wilson lined up to the left of Tate or Eliot, but he had opposed U. S. entry into World War II and in June '46 wrote Eliot: “I wish [Pound] could be quietly let out. I don't think that the writers and artists here have behaved terribly well about him. … In any case, he is such a crackpot politically that his ‘treason’ shouldn't be taken seriously.”

Meanwhile, Pound kept the work coming. He also held a salon in the asylum, receiving literary guests ranging from Edith Hamilton to Robert Lowell. The Pisan Cantos were being readied, and the always testy Pound complained about delays. He seemed not to grasp that a poem beginning with a heartfelt farewell to Mussolini might offend a nation still mourning its dead.

Between 1943 and '48, Tate's Fellows in American Letters had been changing. Originally, and probably at MacLeish's direction, Tate had placed many liberals and New Dealers as Fellows—Mark Van Doren, Van Wyck Brooks, Carl Sandburg. Over the years these tended to drop out. Among the replacements was T. S. Eliot. William McGuire quotes a 1945 letter from Tate urging Eliot's acceptance of the role: “You could expect the utmost consideration and understanding of your needs and purposes, and the full cooperation of the Fellows … most of whom are friends of yours—Willard Thorp, Ted Spencer, and myself, among them.” Cooperation in what? In 1947 Eliot did join. Later that summer, Conrad Aiken—who had brought Eliot and Pound together—and W. H. Auden also received invitations.

At the January 1948 meeting of the Fellows, a poetry prize was proposed. Tate talked to his friend Huntington Cairns, an officer in the Bollingen Foundation. Cairns approached the board and secured ten thousand dollars. In March the prize was announced.

Three months later, on June 16, James Laughlin wrote Pound that “Thursday a council meets on yr behalf at the request of the good Parson Eliot. Cummings, Tate, Auden, Fitzgerald, Fitts and Cornell [Pound's lawyer] will be there and we shall mightywise deliberate and perhaps bring forth a small mechanical mouse.” Whatever else they discussed, Laughlin must have brought them up to date on Pisan Cantos, to be published July 20.

The Fellows, in force, supported this new work. The New Directions press release carried blurbs from Tate, Eliot, Aiken, Lowell, and Theodore Spencer—all Fellows. Eliot cited “a new poignancy of personal speech in the Pisan Cantos,” and avoided politics. Aiken brought up Fascism but suggested that the poetry be judged apart. Lowell compared Pound to Dante's Brunetto Latini. In The New Yorker, Fellow Louise Bogan applauded the fresh cantos: “… filled with a combination of sharp day-to-day observation, erudition, and humorous insight.” Reed Whittemore, in Poetry, did not agree.

The Fellows met next in November, to accommodate Eliot. Eliot had just received the Nobel Prize, and his aura was almost incandescent. Bogan found him enchanting, and Robert Penn Warren remembered William Carlos Williams (no Eliot groupie) murmuring, “Did you see that? He took my hand! Yes sir, he took my hand.”

Before the meeting began, the acting Head Librarian warned the Fellows that their decision must be “rendered strictly in terms of literary merit.” On the second day the nominations were narrowed down. Pisan Cantos had more votes than all other candidates combined.

In 1976 Leonie Adams described the lack of deliberations at the 1948 conclave: “We had absolutely none at the Pound meeting because it was assumed that all the people there knew their own minds, knew what poetry was, and wouldn't make speeches as you would to a class.” This lack of discussion would come back to haunt the Fellows.

Yet one had spoken. Eliot supported the idea of a prize for Pisan Cantos, but felt concerned “as to whether the award would bring Mr. Pound into an undesirable publicity which might be exploited by the wrong elements.” Robert Lowell, a Pound fan who had often visited St. Elizabeth's, agreed to investigate Eliot's concern. A final vote would be tallied in February.

The meetings ended on the eighteenth. That night Huntington Cairns gave a dinner party for the Fellows. When Cairns said he hoped the prize might win attention for the Foundation, Tate grinned—“Will it!!” Cairns then learned that as things stood, Pound would be the recipient. Apparently he did not carry this information back to the Foundation.

Soon Fellow Katherine Chapin, a liberal, communicated her own anxieties and, more significant, the strong misgivings of her husband, Attorney General Francis Biddle. Biddle, an upper-class New Dealer, didn't like Pound's salon at St. Elizabeth's and thought giving him the Bollingen Award would be a disaster for the Fellows and for the Library of Congress. Chapin felt that Pound's anti-Semitic and antidemocratic opinions ran through his work and made him a poor, and dangerous, choice for recognition by the Library.

Leonie Adams had already met with the Librarian, Luther Evans, to warn him the award might be controversial. He refused to intervene, asking only that they prepare a statement on Pound's mental condition. Evans “supposed from the nature of the reviews and assumed the Fellows to suppose that the award on the whole would have critical support and the support of the intelligentsia.” This would later become a vexed question. Evans's statement came even after he had heard a warning of dissension from Karl Shapiro, the only Jew on the jury and the only member who would publicly challenge the award.

Shapiro was something of a protégé to Tate, whose outspoken review of Shapiro's second book made great claims for the younger man's poetry. The third book, V Letter, written while Shapiro served in the Pacific, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944, and when Tate met the thirty-three-year-old Shapiro after the war, he offered him the one-year job of Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress.

Shapiro had voted for Pound at the November meeting, but found he could not live with his decision—a difficult moment for him. Not only was Tate his mentor, but Auden had been a major influence, and the prestige of Eliot was daunting. Shapiro loved being Consultant and a Fellow; if he broke ranks, he feared exclusion. At the end of January 1949 he wrote Tate that after “wrestl[ing] with my soul … I am now prepared to take an anti-Pound stand straight through and to do whatever I can to defeat Pound's election.” Although he had felt Pisan Cantos was clearly the most deserving book, he now thought they couldn't give Pound the prize without some sort of apology from the Fellows. Questions of anti-Semitism had been “passed over,” he thought, and there was a “conspiracy of friendliness” for Pound. Shapiro reserved the right to make a personal statement.

Tate's immediate reply was, as Shapiro would characterize it, “clear and bold.” For Tate, “[T]he politics and anti-Semitism are so far from being irrelevant that I was convinced … that a vote against Pound would have been quite as valid as my affirmative vote.” Tate then explicitly denied that the Fellows had colluded: “And there was no conspiracy of friendship.” Clear and bold, but also disingenuous. Tate's words leave no room for Eliot's presence at the center of a network of correspondence and meetings to address Pound's situation—a network that included Tate.

Tate would hold to this note throughout the controversy. He never played down Pound's anti-Semitism, never tried to deny or evade Pound's politics, never blinked at what was in the Pisan Cantos. But why hadn't he said any of this at the November meetings?

Tate felt that the arts presented a special case. “To fight anti-Semitism as such is one thing; but it is quite a different thing not to make an exception of what may be great art.” Shapiro answered that “Pound's political philosophy vitiates the Cantos and lowers their poetic value.” Shapiro assured Tate that he would feel the same if Pound were a Jew or a communist. He went on to explain “Jewish paranoia and me.” He had in the past tried to keep some distance from his Jewish identity, even practicing “what we refer to as Jewish anti-Semitism.” But since the war he had been drawn closer to that identity, resulting in a crisis for his writing.

Tate's sympathetic response to this reassured Shapiro. But clearly Tate felt Shapiro had been unable to rise above his Jewishness, and he went on to compare Shapiro's feelings to those of many southerners. Tate's analogy seems perverse, though not out of key with Shapiro's remarks about his Jewish identity. However inappropriate the tone of Tate's letter, it does tell us something about how he saw himself in the Bollingen controversy. Tate felt he had experienced prejudice against southerners from northern intellectuals. This made him think that he understood the feelings of Jewish intellectuals. By overlooking Pound's contempt for him and his poetry, Tate thought he had shown his own disinterestedness.

A final tally was held. Shapiro changed his vote, but again Pisan Cantos won. The announcement named the Fellows (“an honorary and advisory group appointed by the Librarian of Congress”) and described the conditions of the award. It closed by quoting the statement of the jury: “To permit other considerations than that of poetic achievement to sway the decision would destroy the significance of the award and would in principle deny the validity of that objective perception of value on which civilized society must rest.”

In his excellent Poetry's Catbird Seat, William McGuire describes the first reactions to the announcement: “The story was broken on Saturday night, the nineteenth, by Charles Collingwood in his radio news broadcast. The Sunday New York Times headline was characteristic of the press reaction: ‘Pound in Mental Clinic, Wins Prize for Poetry Penned in Treason Cell.’” While an editorial in the New York Herald Tribune supported the prize, popular anthologist Louis Untermeyer described the Pisan Cantos as “a ragbag and tail end of Pound at his worst. It shows a disordered mind, one affected by the seeds of Fascism.” Poet Robert Hillyer also lambasted Pound's poetry in the Herald Tribune. Hillyer would be the most extreme and condemnatory of the award's critics, and would deal the hardest blows.

Poetry awards rarely spark so much excitement, but this one was controversial from many angles. Pound had made broadcasts for Mussolini and had been indicted for treason. He was obsessively anti-Semitic at a moment when anti-Semitism was being unavoidably and unforgettably linked in the public mind with concentration camps and gas chambers. He was in a mental hospital. And, too, he represented the avant-garde of a movement perhaps at the end of its high creative period, but which had not—despite Eliot's recent Nobel Prize—completely conquered the literary world. Much of the educated audience felt that the high priests of modernism, the New Critics, were trying to wrest control of poetry. In addition, the award issued from the Library of Congress; citizens who disapproved felt the award had been made in their name but without their vote. This called for protest.

Everyone did not oppose the award. In Politics, a small, influential journal trying to define a space between anarchism and Trotskyism, Dwight Macdonald praised the decision. Macdonald's Orwellian sense of the postwar U. S. saw an award to the enemy of the state as a liberating gesture. But the most famous episodes in the controversy were Partisan Review's editorial and symposium—and a series of articles in the Saturday Review of Literature.

The award to Pound put Partisan Review in a difficult position. They had begun with a commitment to modernism in literature and revolutionary Marxism in politics. Now they strongly opposed the Soviet Union and the Communist Party. Tate contributed often, and Eliot had chosen Partisan for the American appearance of Four Quartets. In advanced circles, to attack a writer as Fascist now seemed vulgar, a leftover from the '30s. The New Critical doctrine that criticism must focus on the art and not the artist had gradually permeated the literary atmosphere, and even Partisan had been partly converted. But a valuable prize to Ezra Pound was too much. Many of the intellectuals around the review were Jewish, and many still claimed some leftist identity. They saw themselves as betrayed by communism, not as having abandoned the Left. Applause for a man who had applauded the Holocaust could not be allowed to pass.

All these issues can be felt in Partisan's first response to the award. William Barrett wrote that of course the man and the art had to be kept separate. In the '30s political judgments and labels had been applied recklessly. However, now we had “another attitude which is so obsessed with formal and technical questions that it has time for only a hasty glimpse at content.” How could the crude anti-Semitic statements in Pisan Cantos be understood as good poetry? Thus he generally accepted the Fellows' criteria, but wondered: “How far is it possible, in a lyric poem, for technical embellishments to transform vicious and ugly matter into beautiful poetry?”

In its next issue, Partisan published a symposium on the award and its repercussions. Only Auden, Shapiro, and Tate spoke for the jury. No one actually defended the book in concrete terms. Auden wrote that “an art which did not accurately reflect evil would not be good art.” However, he continued, if Pisan Cantos might affect readers susceptible to anti-Semitism, it should be suppressed—after receiving the prize. Tate, in a famous outburst, charged Barrett with having accused the Fellows of anti-Semitism, and essentially challenged him to a duel: Such insults, Tate said, should be made to him personally so he might “dispose of the charge at some other level than that of public discussion.”

Shapiro stated that he voted against Pound because as a Jew he could not honor an anti-Semite, and because he believed that Pound's “political and moral philosophy” kept Pisan Cantos from being great poetry. Then, practicing literary judo, he turned the esthetic question against the jury: How objective could they be? “The presence of Mr. Eliot at the meetings … perhaps inhibited open discussion.”

The other contributors were critical but not acrimonious. George Orwell felt that if the Fellows judged Pisan Cantos the year's best poetry, then it deserved the prize. But he wanted everyone to be clear that Pound had been an outspoken supporter of Mussolini since 1928. Orwell had monitored the “disgusting” broadcasts, and he remembered. He wished the Fellows had condemned Pound's politics unequivocally.

Irving Howe did not want Pound executed or the book suppressed, but wondered, Why honor him? Clement Greenberg did not question the Fellows' esthetic verdict, but weren't some things more important than art? Robert Gorham Davis said that the Pound award came from the anti-Enlightenment worldview of the New Critics—many of them members of the Bollingen jury. He contended that anti-Semitism was an integral part of that worldview, and he brought in Eliot's allegiance to Action Française, the royalist, anti-Semitic French political movement. The Pisan Cantos were a “test case for these values.” William Barrett, denying that he had imputed anti-Semitism to the Fellows, reiterated his perception—neither the politicized criticism of the '30s nor the esthetic formalism of the New Critics was adequate for this occasion.

The next issue delivered the defense from Tate that his eruption against Barrett had preempted. Again, Tate conceded a great deal: Anti-Semitism was intrinsic to the Pisan Cantos, which were seriously flawed as a result, not to mention structurally incoherent. Reading his comments, one finds it hard to believe that he had voted for Pound, but eventually he gets around to making a case for the award: “The specific task of the man of letters is to attend to the health of society … through literature, that is, through language.” Tate “had become convinced that he [Pound] had done more than any other living man to regenerate the language … of English verse.” The Fellows owed to society a literary judgment that was sound and objective; the wider society would have to judge and chastise Pound's political activities.

The Partisan crowd were, for the most part, his friends. Now his enemies would take their licks. The weekly Saturday Review of Literature spoke for the opposition. Partisan Review is now treated as the real forum where the Bollingen affair was debated, but actually the Saturday Review's attack was much more severe, reached a wider public, and had more serious immediate consequences. Its audience, larger and more middlebrow than Partisan's, embraced every overlapping group outraged by the award, from patriots to New Dealers to readers and writers who thought great literature ought to be accessible and felt that a small clique of elitist critics had foisted obscurantist poetry on the public. The Saturday Review had been after Pound since his return to Washington in 1945.

For their assault the review's liberal editors, Norman Cousins and Harrison Smith, chose a political conservative. Perhaps they wanted to avoid any leftist associations, for these were the opening years of the Cold War, which Cousins, a world federalist, opposed. Robert Hillyer resembled Eliot—a poet from an old New England family who despised the modern world. The difference was that Eliot had castigated the modern world through modern art while Hillyer thought modern art was part of the problem. Hillyer had held a chair at Harvard, presided over the Poetry Society of America, and won a Pulitzer Prize. Nevertheless, modernism had made him somehow obsolete, and he resented it bitterly.

In those days popular poetry flourished outside the academy. Figures like William Rose and Stephen Vincent Benét, anthologists like Louis Untermeyer and Oscar Williams, women lyricists like Jean Wylie and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and bards of the Midwest like Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg all occupied a solid place in a literary world where John Brown's Body and Spoon River Anthology were respected and widely read. Tate and his modernist friends opposed themselves to that world.

So repelled was Hillyer by every facet of the award that he wrote two separate articles, one attacking the bestowing of the prize, one attacking Eliot and the New Criticism. Cousins and Smith printed a statement before each article declaring their support for Hillyer and his position. The contrast between Hillyer's recriminations and the Partisan symposium was striking: They had conceded the authority and assumptions of the Fellows while questioning the results. Hillyer conceded nothing and jeered the results: “It may be stated flatly that the Pisan Cantos are so disordered as to make the award seem like a hoax.” Partisan had concentrated on Pound's anti-Semitism. While condemning the anti-Semitism (as well as the use of “nigger”), Hillyer focused on Pound's “ruthless mockery of our Christian war dead.”

He found a sinister provenance for the award. Hillyer pointed out that “Bollingen” was Carl Jung's summer house, hence the name of the foundation that had put up the money, the Mellons being great supporters of Jung. Hillyer then produced evidence of Jung's admiration for Hitler. Thus from the Fascist Jung to the Fascist Pound there was a slippery logic and a clear path of money and sympathy. T. S. Eliot, Hillyer claimed, was both Pound's friend and a disciple of Jung. Hillyer sketched a vague spiritual link between New Criticism and Fascism.

Eliot became Hillyer's villain. The difference between Pound and Eliot, he insisted, was one only of style: “Eliot had his British respectability to think of and a wetter finger to the wind.” Hillyer quoted Eliot's infamous dictum that “Reasons of race and religion combine to make any number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.” And he argued that given Eliot's British citizenship, he should not have been on the committee: “Eliot undoubtedly wielded great influence in an award which, under the auspices of the Library of Congress, degraded American poetry and insulted her dead.” Unless Eliot was dropped from the jury, such outrages could recur.

In “Poetry's New Priesthood,” the second article, modernism, the New Criticism, and their combined stranglehold on poetry were Hillyer's subjects: “They have shut the doors of poetry in the face of the public. … Yet their power is enormous.” Eliot was their king although his work was essentially an intellectual hoax. Hillyer refused to take modernism and the New Criticism seriously. It was all a scam, coterie politics.

These articles did more than take issue with a dubious decision. Hillyer and the editors had declared unconditional war on modernism, its captains, and all who rode with them. A kind of paradox resulted. Within the higher reaches of literature, publishing, and academia, the Hillyer articles worked to Tate's advantage. Hillyer had gone too far. MacLeish, close to the situation, read the articles in proof and strongly rebuked them to the editors, though he had opposed the award to Pound. Even those personally offended by Pound's anti-Semitism were loath to write off modern art. New York Jewish intellectuals like Alfred Kazin and Philip Rahv would sign Tate and Berryman's letter, which ran in The Nation in November 1949, condemning Saturday Review.

On the other hand, the Hillyer articles reached into every state of the union. Midwestern poetry societies mobilized, and Congressmen heard from constituents. As Lawrence Schwartz points out, the articles jeopardized Tate's credibility with foundations. Paul Mellon, president of the Bollingen Foundation, did not wish to be linked in a general-circulation magazine (however inaccurately) with Fascism. Karl Shapiro suggested that Hillyer's Jung-Mellon-Eliot-Pound accusations came from a man named Parelhoff, identified by William McGuire as a conspiracy crank whose obsessive pursuit of Jung had been a nuisance for years. (Fortunately for the foundation, Hillyer did not know that, during the war, the FBI had questioned the Mellons regarding a friend of Jung's who had come to the U. S.)

On June 14, Luther Evans wrote to Saturday Review. So grave were the magazine's charges, he declared, that Hillyer and the editors were under obligation to back them up. Evans accused the editors and Hillyer of holding “that poetic quality must somehow pass a political test,” an attitude he considered “dictatorial, illiberal, undemocratic.” Cousins and Smith countered that while “political considerations should not interfere with the evaluation of a work of art,” this did not apply to the Bollingen Award, because “the award was being utilized to take the curse off Pound's political activities against the United States during the war.”

Tate, the Fellows, and the Library felt compelled to put together a formal counterattack to the Hillyer pieces—but in what form? The modernist camp thought the articles a product of Hillyer's envy and self-delusion: “It is a plain fact,” wrote Tate, “that not one member of the Fellows or a single one of the ‘new critics’ has ever noticed Hillyer's work, even to denigrate it.” A rebuttal couched in personal terms would be unsuitable. Still, Tate had asked Frederick Morgan, publisher of Hudson Review, to ask his lawyers whether Saturday Review could be sued for slander. The lawyers thought defending T. S. Eliot from charges of anti-Semitism might be complicated.

For his part, Eliot professed to be mystified by such charges. McGuire quotes his response to the Hillyer articles: Eliot denied trying to exert influence, saying he had not first brought up Pound and that he deplored Pound's anti-Semitism and was certain the Fellows deplored it. Some people, he complained, wanted to believe him an anti-Semite, and there was no way to dissuade them. He had simply thought Pisan Cantos “the best volume under consideration.” He was hardly a disciple of Jung—had never read him.

The Fellows would make a great deal of this, as they would of other mistakes by Hillyer. Hillyer's alleged trail of Fascist influence proved difficult to sustain. Antifascists funded by the Bollingen Foundation complained, and the Foundation insisted that it had not influenced the award. The Saturday Review duly retracted these charges.

The Bollingen controversy belongs in a context of other cultural battles of the Cold War. The Waldorf Conference—in which American fellow travelers and independent leftists joined writers and artists from the Soviet Union to condemn the Cold War—occurred at the end of March 1949. Robert Lowell and other writers attended to attack the Soviet Union in an atmosphere of intense political stress. Lowell had also been involved that winter in the FBI investigation of Yaddo, the writers' colony. In a somewhat exalted state, he had led the effort to have Yaddo's director fired.

Norman Cousins claims in his memoirs that he went along with the Hillyer articles despite misgivings. If that is true, he certainly contributed to the next escalation of the controversy by sending the Hillyer material to Representative Jacob Javits of New York. Javits, a liberal Jewish Republican, saw the Bollingen affair in terms of two issues significant to his constituency and to liberals like Cousins. The U. S. occupation, Javits charged, was too soft on former Nazis. Although stoutly anticommunist, he also worried that McCarthyism would target “everyone who held left-wing or even liberal views.” Perhaps some of the indiscriminate fervor of the witch-hunts could be subdued if the Bollingen Award showed that Fascism was not a dead issue. On July 21, 1949, Javits took the floor of the House to call for an investigation: “Mr. Speaker. We hear much about the infiltration of communist ideas, and Congressional committees are quick to investigate them. Should not this equally be the case with Fascist ideas?” Literary questions must be left to the “literati,” Javits observed, but did the Fellows “appropriately represent the people of the United States”? He never called the Fellows Fascist or named them, but he wanted the committee that oversees the Library of Congress to investigate the award.

The worst fears of Katherine Chapin and her husband had been realized. Tate offered to resign; MacLeish advised against it. The Fellows must now prepare their formal response to the congressional committee. The result was a closely argued text one critic called “a latter-day Areopagitica.” Unfortunately, it was so dense and particular that the media largely ignored it, argues McGuire.

The “Statement of the Fellows” went carefully over the Saturday Review's retractions. Since Hillyer had failed to offer proof of Fascist leanings on the part of any Fellows, that prong of his attack was rejected. The Fellows also tried to show that they were not a cabal and that Eliot had not exercised undue influence, thereby demonstrating the influence they denied. But these are moot points. Eliot, just crowned with the Nobel Prize, had so much magnetism that he didn't need to twist anyone's arm. Nevertheless, the Fellows demonstrated that by any standard they were a distinguished group, widely published and garlanded with prizes and fellowships. Since they clearly had the literary qualifications to judge, and since political grounds were not a valid reason to withhold a prize, weren't the American people best served through the honest exercise of sound professional judgment by the Fellows?

The Library of Congress had its allies among the politicians, and a full investigation was headed off. Saturday Review could claim limited victory, however, since all prizes were taken away from the Library. Yale, where Paul Mellon was a power, took over the Bollingen Award. It would become a way for Tate and his peers to confer recognition on one another.

The statement of the Fellows was recycled, with additional material, as a seventy-two-page pamphlet in Poetry for October 1949. The editor of Poetry was Hayden Carruth, a young poet who felt strongly about the award: “I was concerned to defend the committee, to argue its right to award a prize on aesthetic grounds alone.”

In the pamphlet, Tate responded personally to imputations of Fascism, explaining, with his usual hauteur, that such charges were a communist cliché of the '30s, taken seriously by no one. Perhaps one thing needed clarification. He had contributed often to Seward Collins's American Review: “About 1937, Mr. Collins publicly expressed Fascist sympathies. I declined henceforth to contribute to his magazine.” Tate affirmed the postwar theme that communism and Fascism are simply different forms of totalitarianism, both in strong contrast to his traditional conservatism. Closing with the “sarcasm” that he had voted for president only once—for Roosevelt in 1940—Tate sneered that while communists often voted for FDR, “I never heard of a Fascist who did so.”

In another addition to Poetry's pamphlet, Malcolm Cowley analyzed the controversy. Cowley had friends on both sides—notably Tate—and he had praise and blame for both the committee and its detractors. Sounding very well informed, Cowley set out to make sense of the award: Neither Eliot nor the other Fellows were Fascists or anti-Semites, he thought. So what was their goal? Cowley thinks they wanted higher standards: prizes for sophisticated poetry, not for verses praising motherhood and the flag. Did they succeed? No, Cowley said. Pound is a “spoiled great Poet,” and a “spoiled traitor”; Pisan Cantos, he felt, may be his worst book. But the final, severest sentences were reserved for Hillyer, who had operated out of “personal spite and envy” and done great harm to the Republic of Letters: “Hillyer has gone over to the enemy, like Pound in another war. Worsted in a struggle among his colleagues and compatriots, he has appealed over their heads and under false colors to the great hostile empire of the Philistines.”

The last major episode in the Bollingen controversy was a letter assembled by Tate and John Berryman. Signed by eighty-four academics, writers, and publishers, it directly addressed and rebuked the Saturday Review, which refused to publish it. The Nation, where Tate had good connections, ran it. The list of signers impresses after half a century; it includes Delmore Schwartz, Peter Taylor, Lionel Trilling, James Agee, and Lincoln Kirstein.

The letter did not defend the award to Pound; it attacked Saturday Review: “Your campaign was conducted in a dangerous and unprincipled manner.” In the opinion of the signers, the diatribe against the Fellows “violated the standards of responsible literary controversy.” Next to the letter was a column—“The Saturday Review Unfair to Literature”—by the Nation's literary editor, Margaret Marshall. Cousins and Smith had stalled, complained that the imbroglio was over, and finally said that since the letter was actually a petition, they must have the names of those who had refused to sign—an absurd condition. Marshall once again belabored the editors and Hillyer, whose articles were “a philistine attack on modern literature and especially an attack on modern poetry and poets.”

Five decades have not brought forth another literary furor to equal this one, though the art world can offer competition—the Mapplethorpe affair, for example. If we ask in long retrospect why the award was given to Pound, very different answers appear. In a 1974 interview, Tate said, “I don't see what else we could have done. The award was for the best book published in the preceding year, 1948, and that was obviously the best book. Lots of nonsense was written about the award.” In letters to me, Hayden Carruth and Elizabeth Hardwick expressed similar opinions. Fifty-four years after publication, the Pisan Cantos remain very much alive in the American imagination.

On the other hand, in his Riders on the Earth (1978), Archibald MacLeish, close to the situation, offered a more tendentious version of how the Bollingen was born: “What happened, briefly, was that a group of [Pound's] friends, including a number of the most distinguished American poets of the time, conceived the idea of a new national prize for poetry to be awarded by the Library of Congress through a jury of notables who would select Pound as the first recipient, thus dramatizing his situation and putting the government, and particularly the Department of Justice, in an awkward if not untenable position.”

Pound himself understood the Bollingen as MacLeish had. And like MacLeish, he thought the congressional attention sparked by the Hillyer articles had scotched any hopes for his early release: In 1954 he told an interviewer, “My friends thought if they gave me that prize it would help pave the way for getting out. Ah, of course it raised a furor, and … Jakie Javits gathered all his noisy little forces and saw to it that that intention was blocked.”

Can both sides be right? That Laughlin and Eliot decided Pisan Cantos was Pound's best stuff since the '20s, that Tate had the Fellows on hand, and that someone saw an opportunity to help Pound? Eliot and Tate spoke as if they had no choice, but when they announced the prize, and created the conditions for it, they already knew that Pisan Cantos was coming out, and Eliot at least must have read the manuscript. Given the composition of the Fellows, it is quite possible that a majority could look at the books under consideration, conclude that Pound's was the best, and vote him the award with a clear conscience.

Shapiro called the decision “a conspiracy of friendliness,” and that seems accurate. I take seriously Tate's strong reservations—expressed publicly and privately—about Pound and his poetry. But I also think Tate would have gone to the wall for Eliot, whom he saw as the King Arthur of a modernist Camelot. He denied that Eliot had exerted improper influence, but does anyone doubt that a word from Eliot could have stopped the process at any point? Eliot did warn the committee of repercussions, but did not advise against the award. If Shapiro and Katherine Chapin had spoken out at the November meetings, or if the Librarian had begged the Fellows to reconsider afterwards, would Eliot—a revolutionary poet yet an extremely cautious man—have backed off? He had been collecting letters of support, holding meetings, and sounding people out for years. To see Louise Bogan gushing over Eliot at the November gathering, then writing Tate much later that she regretted the award to Pound, that Shapiro had been right, is to feel Eliot's decisive influence, even if it was exercised with subtlety.

Was the award morally compromised? Again, both sides have cogent arguments. To hold out for high standards in the face of public disapproval, for a government agency to reward an enemy of the state for distinguished achievement—these may be commendable acts in a democracy. And Pisan Cantos has held up as poetry.

But is it not also true that to honor a Fascist is, at the least, to overlook or put aside moral considerations? If the award wasn't a Fascist gesture, it certainly signaled no great animus toward Fascism. As Clement Greenberg asked in Partisan Review, didn't Eliot's Christian society mean putting a few things above esthetic criteria? Would Tate or Eliot have voted a prize to communist Pablo Neruda, or would they have found reasons against?

At some point such arguments float away in a dialectic of abstractions. We can say that the award showed bad judgment. Whatever the Fellows' goals, they cannot have wanted to delay Pound's release, yet such was probably an outcome of the controversy. Great offense was given. They may have lost the battle and won the war. Even their friends thought it was a bad decision to reward Pound, but those same friends joined them to censure Saturday Review and defend modernism. The next decade would be a triumphal procession for New Criticism and modernism. Hillyer was never heard from again.

Here political and moral questions come back from another angle: Late in August 1949, Eliot wrote Willard Thorp, an old friend and a member of the Bollingen jury. Discussing the brouhaha over the prize, Eliot said that Tate saw its cause as cultural conservatism—antimodernism. He, Eliot, saw it as a ploy by the left to draw the pursuit away from itself. Eliot and Tate were both right. But are those the only reasons that someone as wise and sensitive as T. S. Eliot could imagine for the outrage over an award to Ezra Pound? It seems to me that giving such a prestigious prize to Pound three years after the liberation of the death camps was an anti-Semitic gesture, though the Fellows did not understand it as such. They chose to give Pound a symbolic boost, a recognition of his services to modernism, even at the expense of offending Jews and other victims of the Holocaust.

After the Bollingen, Pound seemed to settle in. His friends wondered if his wife, Dorothy, liked having him in St. Elizabeth's, away from Olga Rudge, or if Ezra himself found certain advantages in his situation. Later the Justice Department put off his release because young American Fascists under his influence, like John Kasper, tried to interfere in the struggle over desegregation. It was feared that Pound might go south and get involved. Only in 1958 did he finally get out and return to Italy, where he gave the Fascist salute on disembarking.

But my final concern is with Allen Tate. I attribute his leading role in the story to his loyalty to Eliot and modernism (tenor and vehicle in his mind). His conservative politics contributed also, perhaps. Though not Pound's friend, Tate shared some enemies with him. In Tate's poem “Aeneas at Washington,” the speaker says, “The city my blood had built I knew no more.” Pound felt something similar. Tate said he wanted the U. S. to prevail in World War II, but also “It's not my war.” Pound's “treason” made him a fool but not a pariah in Tate's eyes, and embarrassing the U. S. government was something Tate might contemplate with equanimity.

Tate's support for Karl Shapiro and Delmore Schwartz and his relations with many New York Jewish intellectuals suggest that he was not an anti-Semite, although Thomas Underwood's recent biography cites derogatory remarks in Tate's letters to John Peale Bishop. Much of his correspondence with Jewish intellectuals in the '50s consists of their requests for letters of reference, followed by thank-you notes—they got the grant or the job.

Tate's entanglements in the Bollingen story are deeply consistent, for the affair mirrors his dramatically divided personality: a dignity and a constructive engagement that made him a leading literary citizen, combined with a rebellious alienation: “‘[C]alidus juventa’ running over with violent feelings” was Tate's recollection of himself as a Vanderbilt student. Tate had more than a touch of the Baudelairean dandy, “the living indictment of a standardizing democracy,” who “unites within himself all the gentlemanly virtues that are still possible today.” The dandy's ironic courtesy, often the mask of a profound negation, just as often in Tate masked generosity and enthusiasm. In the Bollingen controversy—as in the best of his poems and essays—we see the formality, the engagement, and the negation flowing through each other.