Ezra Pound: Poems Ezra Pound

Birth of the children

The Pounds were unhappy in Paris. Dorothy complained about the winters and Ezra's health was poor.[225] At one dinner in the Place de l'Odéon, a Surrealist guest high on drugs had tried to stab Pound in the back; Robert McAlmon had wrestled with the attacker, and the guests had managed to leave before the police arrived.[226] For Pound the event underlined that their time in France was over.[227] They decided to move to a quieter place, leaving in October 1924 for the seaside town of Rapallo in northern Italy.[228] Hemingway wrote in a letter that Pound had "indulged in a small nervous breakdown" during the packing, leading to two days at the American Hospital of Paris in Neuilly.[229] During this period the Pounds lived on Dorothy's income, supplemented by dividends from stock she had invested in.[230]

Pregnant by Pound, Olga Rudge followed the couple to Italy, and in July 1925 she gave birth to a daughter, Maria, in a hospital in Brixen. Rudge and Pound placed the baby with a German-speaking peasant woman in Gais, South Tyrol, whose own child had died and who agreed to raise Maria for 200 lire a month.[231] Pound reportedly believed that artists ought not to have children, because in his view motherhood ruined women. According to Hadley Richardson, he took her aside before she and Hemingway left Paris for Toronto to have their child, telling her: "Well, I might as well say goodbye to you here and now because [the baby] is going to change you completely."[232]

At the end of December 1925 Dorothy went on holiday to Egypt, returning on 1 March,[233] and in May the Pounds and Olga Rudge left Rapallo for Paris to attend a semi-private concert performance at the Salle Pleyel of Le Testament de Villon, a one-act opera Pound had composed ("nearly tuneless", according to Carpenter) with the musicians Agnes Bedford and George Antheil.[234][u] Pound had hired two singers for the performance; Rudge was on violin, Pound played percussion, and Joyce, Eliot and Hemingway were in the audience.[236]

The couple stayed on in Paris after the performance; Dorothy was pregnant and wanted the baby to be born at the American hospital. Hemingway accompanied her there in a taxi for the birth of a son, Omar Pound, on 10 September 1926.[237] (Ezra was an admirer of Fitzgerald's translation of Omar Khayyam.)[238] Ezra signed the birth certificate the following day at Neuilly town hall and wrote to his father, "next generation (male) arrived. Both D & it appear to be doing well."[237] He ended up in the American hospital himself for tests and, he told Olga, a "small operation".[239] Dorothy took Omar to England, where she stayed for a year and thereafter visited him every summer. He was sent to live at first in Felpham, Sussex, with a former superintendent of Norland College, which trains nannies,[240] and later became a boarder at Charterhouse.[241] When Dorothy was in England with Omar during the summers, Ezra would spend the time with Olga.[242] Olga's father helped her buy a house in Venice in 1928,[243] and from 1930 she also rented the top floor of a house in Sant'Ambrogio, Caso 60, near the Pounds in Rapallo.[244]

The Exile, Dial poetry award

In 1925 a new literary magazine, This Quarter, dedicated its first issue to Pound, including tributes from Hemingway and Joyce.[245] In Hemingway's contribution, "Homage to Ezra", he wrote that Pound "devotes perhaps one fifth of his working time to writing poetry and in this twenty per cent of effort writes a large and distinguished share of the really great poetry that has been written by any American living or dead—or any Englishman living or dead or any Irishman who ever wrote English."[246]

With the rest of his time he tries to advance the fortunes, both material and artistic, of his friends. He defends them when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. He loans them money. He sells their pictures. He arranges concerts for them. He writes articles about them. He introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying and he witnesses their wills. He advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide. And in the end a few of them refrain from knifing him at the first opportunity.[246]

Against Hemingway's positive view of Pound, Richard Aldington told Amy Lowell that year that Pound had been almost forgotten in England: "as the rest of us go up, he goes down", he wrote.[247] In the U.S., Pound won the $2,000 Dial poetry award in 1927[248] for his translation of the Confucian classic Great Learning.[249] Using the prize money, he launched his own literary magazine, The Exile, in March, but only four issues appeared. It did well in the first year, with contributions from Hemingway, E. E. Cummings, Basil Bunting, Yeats, William Carlos Williams, and Robert McAlmon.[250] Some of the poorest work consisted of Pound's rambling editorials on Confucianism or in praise of Lenin, according to biographer J. J. Wilhelm.[251] His parents visited him in Rapallo that year, seeing him for the first time since 1914. His father had retired, so they moved to Rapallo themselves, taking a small house, Villa Raggio, on a hill above the town.[252]

Antisemitism, social credit

Pound's antisemitism can be traced to at least 1910, when he wrote in Patria Mia, his essays for the New Age: "The Jew alone can retain his detestable qualities, despite climatic conditions." The sentence was removed from the 1950 edition.[86] In 1922 he apparently disliked that so many Jews were contributing to The Dial,[253] and in 1939, when he read his poetry at Harvard, he was said to have included antisemitic poems in the program because he believed there were Jews in the audience.[254][v]

A friend of Pound's, the writer Lina Caico, wrote to him in March 1937 asking him to use his musical contacts to help a German-Jewish pianist in Berlin who did not have enough money to live on because of the Nuremberg Laws. Normally willing to help fellow artists, Pound replied (at length): "You hit a nice sore spot ... Let her try Rothschild and some of the bastards who are murdering 10 million anglo saxons in England."[257] He nevertheless denied being an antisemite; he said he liked Spinoza, Montaigne, and Alexander del Mar. "What I am driving at", he wrote to Jackson Mac Low, "is that some kike might manage to pin an antisem label on me IF he neglected the mass of my writing."[258][w]

Pound came to believe that World War I had been caused by finance capitalism, which he called "usury",[3] and that the Jews had been to blame. He believed the solution lay in C. H. Douglas's idea of social credit.[97] Pound several times used the term Leihkapital (loan capital), equating it with Jews.[260] Hitler had used the same term in Mein Kampf (1926).[261][x] "Your enemy is Das Leihkapital," Pound wrote in a 1942 radio script aimed at the UK, "international, wandering Loan Capital. Your enemy is not Germany, your enemy is money on loan. And it would be better to be infected with typhus ... than to be infected with this blindness which prevents you from understanding HOW you are undermined ... The big Jew is so bound up with this Leihkapital that no one is able to unscramble that omelet."[263] The argument ran that without "usury" and Jews, there would be no class conflict.[264]

In addition to presenting his economic ideas in hundreds of articles and in The Cantos, Pound wrote over 1,000 letters a year throughout the 1930s.[265] From 1932 he wrote 180 articles for The New English Weekly, a social-credit journal founded by A. R. Orage, and 60 for Il Mare, a Rapallo newspaper.[266] He wrote to Bill Bird that the press in Paris was controlled by the Comité des forges. He also came under the influence of Charles Maurras, who led the far-right Action Française.[267]

Meeting Mussolini

In December 1932 Pound requested a meeting with Mussolini after being hired to work on a film script about Italian fascism. Pound had asked to see Mussolini previously—Olga Rudge had played privately for Mussolini on 19 February 1927—but this time he was given an audience.[268] They met on 30 January 1933 at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, the day Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany.[269]

When Pound handed Mussolini a copy of A Draft of XXX Cantos, Mussolini reportedly said of a passage Pound highlighted that it was not English. Pound said: "No, it's my idea of the way a continental Jew would speak English", to which Mussolini replied "How entertaining" (divertente).[270] Pound tried to discuss an 18-point draft of his economic theories.[270] (Daniel Swift writes that this story has been "told and retold, and in each version, the details shift".)[271] Pound recorded the meeting in "Canto XLI".[272]

Pound wrote to C. H. Douglas that he had "never met anyone who seemed to get my ideas so quickly as the boss".[273] The meeting left him feeling that he had become a person of influence, Redman writes, someone who had been consulted by a head of state.[274] When he returned to Rapallo, he was greeted at the station by the town band.[270]

A QVESTO," said the Boss, "è divertente." catching the point before the aesthetes had got there; Having drained off the muck by Vada From the marshes, by Circeo, where no one else wd. have drained it. Waited 2000 years, ate grain from the marshes: Water supply for ten million, another one million "vani" that is rooms for people to live in. XI of our era.

— On meeting Mussolini[275]

Immediately after the meeting Pound began writing The ABC of Economics and Jefferson and/or Mussolini: L'Idea Statale Fascism as I Have Seen It (1935). The latter was ready by the end of February,[276] although he had trouble finding a publisher. In 1942 Pound told Italy's Royal Finance Office that he had written the book for propaganda purposes in Italy's interests.[277] He wrote articles praising Mussolini and fascism for T. S. Eliot's The Criterion in July 1933, the New York World Telegram in November 1933, the Chicago Tribune on 9 April 1934,[278] and in 65 articles for the British-Italian Bulletin, published by the Italian Embassy in London.[279]

Pound's antisemitism deepened with the introduction in Italy of the racial laws in 1938,[y] preceded by the publication in July that year of the Manifesto of Race. Mussolini instituted restrictions against Jews, who had to register. Foreign Jews lost their Italian citizenship, and on 18 September 1938 Mussolini declared Judaism "an irreconcilable enemy of fascism".[281]

Visit to America

Ezra Pound reclining, 1939

— by Wyndham Lewis

When Olivia Shakespear died in October 1938 in London, Dorothy asked Ezra to organize the funeral, where he saw their 12-year-old son, Omar, for the first time in eight years. He visited Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, who produced a famous portrait of Pound reclining.[282]

Believing he could stop America's involvement in World War II, Pound sailed for New York in April 1939 on the SS Rex in a first-class suite.[283][z] Giving interviews on the deck in a tweed jacket, he told reporters that Mussolini wanted peace.[283] In Washington, D.C., he attended a session of Congress, sitting in a section of the gallery reserved for relatives (because of Thaddeus Coleman Pound).[284] He lobbied senators and congressmen,[285] had lunch with the Polish ambassador, warning him not to trust the English or Winston Churchill,[286] and asked to see the President but was told it could not be done.[284]

He took part in a poetry reading at Harvard, where he agreed to be recorded by the Department of Speech,[287] and in July he received an honorary doctorate from Hamilton College, along with the radio commentator H. V. Kaltenborn. Kaltenborn, whom Pound referred to at the time as Kaltenstein, gave an anti-fascist speech after lunch ("dictatorships shall die, but democracies shall live"), which Pound interrupted loudly to the point where, according to one account, the college president had to intervene.[288] Pound described this years later to Wyndham Lewis: "That was a music hall day, with a stage set/ only at a Kawledg Komencement wd/ one git in mouth-shot at that sort of wind-bag/ that fahrt Kaltenbourne."[289][aa] Pound sailed back to Italy a few days later on the SS Conte di Savoia.[291]

Between May and September 1939 Pound wrote 12 articles for the Japan Times (he became their "Italian correspondent"),[292] which included the claim that "Democracy is now currently defined in Europe as a 'country run by Jews'".[293] He discussed the "essential fairness of Hitler's war aims" and wrote that Churchill was a senile front for the Rothschilds.[294]