A while ago, someone asked about friends of Pound who had
confronted him about his anti-Semitism and pro-fascism. Bunting, James
McLaughlin and Marianne Moore were cited. There is another instance in the
fine biography of Nancy Cunard by Anne Chisholm (Knopf, 1979).
        Cunard, of course, was one of the most vivid figures in Paris
between the wars. She and Pound had a heated affair in 1921-1923 and
remained friends thereafter.  In 1930 her Hours Press in France published 
"A draft of XXX  Cantos".  Both she and her black lover of the time, Henry
Crowder, are mentioned in the Pisan Cantos.  In 1946 she heard that Pound 
had been trying to get in touch with her from St. Elizabeth's ("Nancy where
art thou?" 80/ 510) and wrote him a long letter reviewing their friendship
of 30 years. They had not met since 1928 but corresponded as she turned
sharply to the left and he to the right. They had argued bitterly over the
Spanish Civil War.
        In the 1946 letter, Cunard is grateful to Pound for his help with 
her poetry and for instilling in her a love of the French countryside. Then
comes politics: "[William Carlos] Williams has called you misguided. I do 
not agree. The correct word for a Fascist is 'scoundrel.' ...Fascism is not
insanity, unless evil itself, all evil, be insanity (a point that can
certainly be argued psychologically and philosophically, in the abstract. 
War is not abstract). ... I cannot understand how the integrity that was so
much you in your writing can have chosen the enemy of all integrity."
        Cunard cites several anti-Semitic outbursts by Pound in their
correspondence and then looses a tremendous remark: "Incidentally, for
several years, I thought you were Jewish yourself, Ezra. What could it have
mattered, one way or the other?"
        Pound sent her a short reply in August, 1946, beginning "What the 
blue beggaring hell are you talking about?"
 
 
Paul Montgomery
Lausanne, Switzerland