SOURCE: Hillyer, Robert. “Treason's Strange Fruit: The Case of Ezra Pound and the Bollingen Award.” Saturday Review of Literature 32, no. 24 (11 June 1949): 9-11, 28.

[In the following essay, Hillyer, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former president of the Poetry Society of America, heatedly explains why Pound is undeserving of the 1949 Bollingen Award for poetry.]

Last February 20 the press announced that Ezra Pound, who was then under suspended indictment for high treason, had been awarded a new prize, the Bollingen-Library of Congress Award of ＄1,000. The award was made by “a jury of Fellows of the Library of Congress in American Letters,” which had adjudged Pound's “Pisan Cantos” to be “the highest achievement of American poetry in 1948.” Except for those facts, the general public, even that part of it which is interested in literary matters, knows little.

It is my purpose in these two articles to provide information concerning the background of this award from two points of view, the political and cultural, which are in this case closely related.

Ezra Pound is quite simply under indictment for treason because during the last war he served the enemy in direct poetical and propaganda activities against the United States. The defense has been that he was insane, which may be an interesting commentary on his prize-winning poetry. His poems are the vehicle of contempt for America, Fascism, anti-Semitism, and, in the prizewinning “Pisan Cantos” themselves, ruthless mockery of our Christian war dead. That fact may place the award, and the committee on the Bollingen Prize, in an observable relationship to our dead and to the nation they died for. Lastly, the award was sponsored by the Library of Congress and its Librarian. The Library is the property of the American people; the Librarian is their paid custodian. Should this matter come up for investigation by Congress, neither the Librarian nor the Bollingen group will have the right to argue that it is an attempt on the part of government to control literature; on the contrary, this group has apparently invoked the sanction of government for its own ends.

At my request, Luther H. Evans, the Librarian of Congress, furnished me with data about the background of the award. In 1936, through private generosity, a chair of poetry was founded in the Library of Congress, to which appointments are made on an annual basis. In 1942 Allen Tate, the incumbent, with the approval of Archibald MacLeish, then Librarian of Congress, established a group known as the Fellows of the Library of Congress in American Letters. I have been unable to discover from the Library how or by whom this impressively titled group of fellows is appointed. They first met on May 26, 1942. At the time of the 1948 Bollingen Award, the Fellows included Allen Tate, Katherine Garrison Chapin (Mrs. Francis Biddle), Katherine Anne Porter, Willard Thorp, Paul Green, Louise Bogan, T. S. Eliot (a native of the United States who has become a British citizen), Theodore Spencer (who died January 18, 1949, after the award had been decided upon), Conrad Aiken, Wystan Hugh Auden (a native of Great Britain who is now an American citizen), Karl Shapiro, Robert Penn Warren, Robert Lowell, and Léonie Adams. The first five have been members of the group since it was begun. To quote Mr. Evans:

Through the activities of this group, the Bollingen Foundation offered to the Library of Congress a gift of funds to enable it, over a period of ten years, to make an annual award of ＄1,000 to the author of that book of verse published during the previous calendar year which, in the judgment of the Fellows in American Letters, represented the highest achievement of American poetry during that year. The Fellows may, however, decline to make an award for any year if in their judgment no poetry worthy of the prize was published during the year.

In view of Pound's hatred for the democracy of his native country, it is ironic that among the conditions of the award is the stipulation that the recipient must be an American citizen. By some tenuous legality Pound may be a citizen, but he knows nothing and cares less about civic obligations. Louis Untermeyer describes him as “the most belligerent expatriate of his generation.” He has seldom set foot in America since he was twenty-three. His country's elections, wars, aspirations, and exploits have left him untouched if not hostile. After a lifetime of writing characterized by William Butler Yeats as “nervous obsession, nightmare, stammering confusion,” this alienated citizen produced the “Pisan Cantos,” certainly the worst of the lot. Yet the Bollingen jury stretched a point to consider Pound a citizen and defied all critical standards by finding in the “Pisan Cantos” the best American poetry of 1948.

Even in this brief summary of facts, several questions arise and some of them can be answered. Where did the Bollingen money come from? Ten annual ＄1,000 prizes are not easily obtained in these days. The money was given by the Mellon Foundation and set up as the Bollingen Foundation at the behest of Paul Mellon, the son of Andrew Mellon, former Secretary of the Treasury.

Why was the prize named the Bollingen Award? Where does the name come from? At this point, I must cite an incident which illustrates the ignorance of the jury itself concerning the background of the prize. One of the members, Professor Willard Thorp, of Princeton, when asked by a reporter where the name of Bollingen came from, responded that he did not know, but he thought “it must be a family name.” If so learned a member of the committee was in the dark, how should his less gifted colleagues be better informed? If gold rust, what shall iron do? But the original sponsors of the awards must have known what the name meant.

Bollingen is the Swiss lakeside retreat of the psychoanalyst Dr. Carl G. Jung. It is near Zurich. There, in an idyllic cottage, dwell Dr. Jung and his wife, receiving the visits, adulation, and gifts of many, including such millionaires as Paul Mellon. It is said that his first wife was one of Dr. Jung's patients. There is no implication in what follows that Mr. Mellon had any knowledge of Dr. Jung's former connection with Nazism.

The issue of Dr. Jung's pro-Nazism has been hotly argued, though certain facts are a matter of record. For a time Dr. Jung's admiration for Adolf Hitler was warm, and his services to the Nazi cause, including propaganda activities during his trips to this country, were considerable. Among his sympathies were included such Nazi flourishes as racism in general, the superman, anti-Semitism, and a weird metaphysics embracing occultism, alchemy, and the worship of Wotan. Convincing proof of all this is to be found in special research by A. D. Parelhoff and in Edward Glover's article “Freud or Jung” in Horizon for March 1949. Here are a few quotations from Jung: “The American presents to us a strange picture: A European with Negro mannerisms and an Indian soul” (1930). “The Jew, as a relative nomad, never has had and never will have his own culture. … The Aryan unconscious is a higher unconscious than the Jewish” (1934). “Hitler's first idea is to make his people powerful because the spirit of the Aryan German deserves to be supported by might, muscle, and steel” (1936). “The paean of the Italian nation is addressed to the personality of the Duce, and the dirges of other nations lament the absence of great leaders” (1939). “German policy is not made; it is revealed through Hitler. He is the mouthpiece of the gods of old” (1939).

I had personal contact with Dr. Jung's Nazism. At luncheon during the Harvard Tercentenary of 1936, Dr. Jung, who was seated beside me, deftly introduced the subject of Hitler, developed it with alert warmth, and concluded with the statement that from the high vantage point of Alpine Switzerland Hitler's new order in Germany seemed to offer the one hope of Europe.

Through the generosity of Paul Mellon, the Bollingen Foundation supports the Pantheon Press, a publishing house which issues many outpourings of the new estheticism, the literary cult to whom T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are gods. More significant, it is apparently still congenial to Jung and his school, who have now dropped their Nazi allegiance but not necessarily the symptoms of Nazism. Let me quote from a review which appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine of M. Esther Harding's “Psychic Energy: Its Source and Goal,” published by Pantheon Press, with a foreword by C. G. Jung:

In this book the author, via a Jungian delving into the “unconscious,” attempts to answer the query whether or not the primitive and “unconscious” side of man's nature can be tamed effectively or even altered. She believes that contemporary culture and civilization afford but a poor façade covering unconscious roots that are essentially base, vile, and self-annihilating. … Men must regress to primitive levels of the unconscious, as seen in the totalitarian rationalization and the world conflicts of today. The author holds out little hope of changing the “collective unconscious” of a people but individuals may be saved. … The book is as pessimistic and ethereal as anything Jung himself might have written.

Among the acknowledgments in the foreword to “Psychic Energy,” Miss Harding pays this moving tribute: “Many thanks are due as well to Mr. Paul Mellon for much helpful criticism and for the time and interest he has devoted to this book.” It would seem that the reservoir at Bollingen has many outlets, but I cannot recommend the water as potable. It is not my conception of a Pierian Spring or a Fountain of Bandusia.

It is appropriate that an award named after Dr. Jung's headquarters should be given to Ezra Pound. But it is extraordinary that it should be awarded by a committee of Americans and sponsored by the Library of Congress.

Pound's career in the service of Mussolini as propagandist and agent against the United States is too well known to need summary here. He was arrested in Italy on a charge of treason, was pronounced sane, and seemed ripe for hanging. As soon as he stepped on American soil, however, he officially lost his mind, and is now lodged in a comfortable room any of our wounded veterans would envy, in St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington. Members of the jury and other apologists have argued that the writings of Pound and the actions of Pound are two different things and must be considered independently. Art is art and life is life and never the twain shall meet. Let us, then, devote our attention to the “Pisan Cantos.” Would they have won an award had they been submitted by an anonymous author? Have they any intrinsic merit as poetry?

It may be stated flatly that the “Pisan Cantos” are so disordered as to make the award seem like a hoax. If they are poetry at all, then everything we have previously known as poetry must have been something else. In no sense are they a work “of an extremely high order,” as Karl Shapiro maintained even when dissenting from the committee's decision. In general, they are merely the landslide from the kitchen-midden of a heart long dead: broken memories, jagged bits of spite, splinters of a distorting glass wherein the world is seen as it is not, a hodge-podge of private symbols, weary epigrams, anecdotes, resentments, chuckles, and the polyglot malapropisms that pass for erudition among the elite. Some individual passages are clear enough, decked out with oddments of reading such as sophomores delight to identify. I have enough information to know that when Pound speaks of “broom plants” he is thinking of the Plantagenet kings, and I have enough languages to understand many of his not very recondite tags. Occasionally he deviates into sense, and on page 94 there is a fair lyric beginning, “Tudor indeed is gone and every rose.” Most of the rest is rubbish.

There are scornful references to “niggers” and obscenities indicated by initials. In the opening lines, where even the most careless member of the jury could not have missed it, there is a tearful elegy, in the Pound lingo, on Mussolini and his mistress:

The enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant's bent shoulders
Manes! Manes was tanned and stuffed,
Thus Ben and la Clara a Milano
That maggots shd / eat the dead bullock
DIGENES διγενέs, but the twice crucified
          where in history will you find it?
You say this to the Possum: a bang, not a whimper,
          with a bang not a whimper.

The concluding line of this touching dirge seems to be addressed to T. S. Eliot under the soubriquet of “Possum,” a name used by Eliot in his mirth-provoking book on cats. The regret for the passing of the “twice crucified” Italian gangster is clear enough.

Clear, also, are the following four lines on page 17:

from their seats the blond bastards, and cast 'em.
          the yidd is a stimulant, and the goyim are cattle
in gt / proportion and go to saleable slaughter
with the maximum of docility.

The first line is an ironic travesty on American sentiments toward the Nazis. The last three lines tell us that the Jews stimulate wars in order to make money, while the stupid Christians (under the contemptuous term of goyim) go out to fight and are slaughtered. As will be noted, the first line is merely another example of Pound's prevailing and brutal anti-Semitism. In the last three lines the Christian soldiers who were killed in the war are described as “cattle” who “go to saleable slaughter with the maximum of docility.” I doubt that living Americans will tolerate that sneer at their dead.

However, the lines were not only tolerated but applauded by a group of Americans and one expatriate on the Bollingen jury. Such an esthetic contempt for mankind, especially those best of mankind who in courage and loyalty laid down their lives, can scarcely be imagined. Cynicism and heartlessness have never gone further. Think of it: in the name of the Library of Congress, these esthetes crowned as their laureate the man who wrote those words.

The alien, or expatriate, T. S. Eliot was not in the original group of Fellows in American Letters; he is a disciple of Dr. Jung; and he has been for years an intimate of Pound. Both Pound and Eliot, and Eliot especially, have a stranglehold on American poetry through the so-called “new criticism.” Their tastes are dissimilar in some ways, Pound's being of bohemia and Eliot's of the British county families. Likewise, the quality of their intolerance shows a difference. Pound has been outspoken straight through the “Pisan Cantos.” Eliot had his British respectability to think of and a wetter finger in the wind. His frankest anti-Semitism dates back to 1932, when in a speech at the University of Virginia he remarked that “reasons of race and religion combine to make any number of free-thinking Jews undesirable. A spirit of excessive tolerance is to be deprecated.” It is probable that he would like to expunge this speech from the memories of men. Failing that, he has discovered quite recently that the Jew had a contribution, and now mentions with approbation “the legacy of Greece, Rome, and Israel.” This statement does not wholly cover his tracks, but, in any case, the man who made conversions fashionable surely has a right to avail himself of them. Harry Roskolenko, in “The Cant in Pound's Cantos,” appearing in the Congress Weekly for April 11, 1949, puts the matter succinctly:

One may well ask if the Fascist is always an anti-Semite, or if the anti-Semite is the consistent political exponent of Fascism. In the case of Eliot we do not see this consistency. Eliot is much too sophisticated a man, too weary with his turnings and squirmings, to bring his work into the Fascist focus. He has his small doses of anti-Semitism, noticed largely because he is a so-important-man-of letters … Eliot is chiefly a man of occasional if subtle ventures. But both Pound and Eliot stem from the same literary environment … The bohemian Pound and the sacred Eliot merged and then parted, each preparing his own elegy of the American.

Eliot's whole life has been a flight from his native St. Louis, Missouri. He has gone far, and doubtless, if he survives Masefield, he will be the next English Laureate. In America he is so enhedged with nebulous divinity that people are shocked, as by blasphemy, at anything said against him. This is occasioned not so much by his writings as by the awe for a man who managed to get contemporary America out of his system, an aspiration of many new poets and critics. Yet it is not only the folk who carry furled umbrellas on a sunny day and pronounce dictionary with one less syllable than their parents gave it, who are attracted to this queer figure. He has succeeded—where Oscar Wilde failed—in promulgating the doctrine of art-for-art's-sake throughout all ranks, and even among left-wing critics and intellectuals he finds some of his most sedulous interpreters.

Yet the long, spectacular climb, that has made him as it were the Diamond Jim Brady of poets, has left him winded and wincing. “It is possible,” writes Lewis Gannett, “that a part of Mr. Eliot's disillusion with the contemporary world is the product of his own deracination. He repudiates at once the aspiration and hopefulness of his grandfather, who transformed the St. Louis public school system, and of contemporary Labor England. He has made himself a man without a country, is uncomfortable about it, and rationalizes his own rootlessness.”

This flaw has cracked the entire fabric. Eliot has long tinkered with Humpty-Dumpty in public, but, as was noted long ago, not all the king's horses and all the king's men can put Humpty-Dumpty together again. We observe a man homesick for an aristocratic society which is his neither by birth nor heritage; which, in fact (regrettably perhaps), has ceased to exist. He is a proponent of classicism swayed by the most whimsical and idiosyncratic vagaries of taste and performance. He is the advocate of a kind of humanism in which no trace of humanity can be found.

Eliot should never have been on the committee in the first place. An Englishman to the manor born would have declined to participate. Unless our ancestors made a grave mistake, and I have no doubt there are members of the committee who think they did, Eliot is a foreigner. He gave up this country in favor of one he liked better. That is a question of taste. But it does not seem quite cricket to move away from the house that had the plumtree in the backyard and then return for the plums. Many of his willing helpers, however, would agree with him that his present home is much more elegant and that he should be deferred to.

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 he resigns, he might well have the next nine Bollingen awards in his grasp. And who, incidentally, appoints the Fellows in American Letters that so many come from the exponents and idols of the “new criticism”? Most important of all, is it proper or legal for such a group to exist, appointed privately, even secretly, yet speaking openly under the authority of the American Congress?

What is to be done? The 1949 Bollingen Award is a permanent disgrace and cannot be expunged. But preventive measures against a similar choice can be taken. The first step would seem to be for the expatriate T. S. Eliot to be dropped from the jury.