>My grad student Sarah Holmes, who is finishing up the editing
>of the 1930s EP/William Borah correspondence (forthcoming with U. Ill.
>Press), has some questions she hopes you'll help her answer.
>She is currently off-list.  However, she would appreciate your
>replying to her email address: [log in to unmask]
>
>Her questions follow:
>==Dan Pearlman
>----------------------------------------------------
>3) Why did Pound dislike Woodrow Wilson?

I would like the answer to that one myself.  I can't find it.

In 1924 Pound asked Yeats, at that time a senator of the new Irish Republic,
  if he could get him an Irish passport, “and thus free me from the
degrading contact with the sons of bitches who represent the infamous
Wilsonian tyranny and red tape.”

What this tyranny consists in, and how it is worse than the fascist tyranny
Pound later embraces, remains one of the chief unanswered questions for
Pound scholars.  I have a few suggestions as to why Pound disliked Wilson so
intensely.

First let me mention that while looking up Wilson in the Carpenter
biography, I came across these quotes on the antisemitic issue.  (I must
say, I came across them accidentally, because they happen to be on the same
page as a quote about Wilson, lest it be suspected that I sought them out,
or had Doob “under my bed” . . . .The quotes are not from Doob, but from
POUND).

Carpenter, interestingly enough, presents some of these quotes as evidence
that Pound’s anti-semitism was not always consistent, at least in the
pre-WWII years.

Here are four quotes to examine:

1)  "Heuffer is damn well no jew, and no man ever had less of the jew in
him."


2)  “Jews!!!!  ooo sez I ates the jews?  I hate SOME JEWS, but I have
greater conempt for Christians. . . ."

Why hate anyone, I ask. Why does Pound feel the need to hate.  Doesn’t
hatred itself detract from the creative impulse, or distort it?

3) ". . . . Look wot they [Christians] dun to america; Bryan, Wilson,
Volstead, all goyim horrible goyim.  Curtis, Lorimer, american womens clubs,
all the tripe all goyim.  Of course some jews are unpleasant, ask any jew if
they aint.”

Is this depreciation of “goyim” and of women for setting up clubs where they
might work towards their political liberation supposed to mitigate our
perception of Pound’s anti-semitism? Did Pound go around asking Jews if they
were unpleasant, I wonder, expecting them to all say, "Yes, of course, we
are very unpleasant, as you very well know."


4)   "I will say this at least for Gracie, she isn’t a jew."

Quite often, in Pound, the term ‘jew’ is simply a derogatory epithet in and
of itself.


And for good measure, we’ll throw in this quote:

4)  My recollections of nearly all the niggers I have ever known are quite
pleasant . . .”

Will anyone on this list want to conclude from this quote that Pound did NOT
have a racist attitude toward blacks?

Just in this short space we have a lot to consider:  anti-black racism,
sexism, and anti-semitism. People want to blame me perhaps, but these are
Pound’s words, and why should we avoid them?

I wonder if Pound disliked Wilson because he was too much of an
internationalist, not enough of a racist (though Wilson was racist enough in
his own way), because he took the US into World War One, because he tried to
found the league of nations, or for some other reasons.  Wilson is mentioned
in the Cantos as one who gives speeches out of "his arse" but that seems as
applicable to Hitler and Mussolini as anyone else.  So it remains for me a
puzzle.  Any answers?

---Wei


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