Actually, Francis Gavin can be understood to be making some sense. On
etymological grounds, it appears that when Hanno said "gorillas," he was
referring to human beings. But whether Pound knew this, of course, can't be
determined from the text of Canto 40. The later Pound certainly had no
trouble thinking of people as subhuman -- witness the disgusting prurience
of his speculations about the effect of circumcision on the Jews. But that
was the later Pound.

On the other hand, even the early Pound seems to have taken lessons in
zoological abuse from somebody like Andrei Vishinsky. Has anyone managed to
count how many people are referred to in the early letters as skunks?

And in case anyone is still reading: from a few sentences in the letters it
appears that  during the 1930s and/or 1940s Pound corresponded with Lothrop
Stoddard, a racist journalist who was influential in securing the passage
of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924.* So far as I'm aware, though,
none of the Pound-Stoddard correspondence has been located. Am I right
about that? And does anyone know whether Pound read Stoddard's _Into the
Darkness: Nazi Germany Today_ (Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1940)?

Jonathan Morse


* He's the "Goddard" of _The Great Gatsby_ -- the deep thinker whose book
_The Rise of the Colored Empires_ gets Tom Buchanan excited about being a
Nordic. In the runup to the Immigration Restriction Act, Stoddard churned
out book after near-identical racist book, but the title closest to
Fitzgerald's allusion is _The Rising Tide of Color Against White
World-Supremacy_ (Scribners, 1920).