Dear Poundians:

I've just finished Leon Surette's latest work, Pound in Purgatory, and
I hope that it isn't too presumptuous of me to think that a few comments
might get some discussion going.

As I might have predicted, this work is now essential reading for anyone
interested in the intellectual context in which Pound developed--it would
take an expert on Pound's mysticism to confront Pound's economics! The
book is amazingly erudite and yet quite readable, especially when it comes
to economic theory--clearly it will be the final word on Pound's
relationship to European economic traditions.

I do, however, think that the book shortchanges the extent to which Pound
was influenced by American ideas about money.  This may be because Leon
focuses on the post-World War I period.  But Pound was, contrary to what
Leon says, quite engaged with economics via Populism and his father's work
much, much earlier.

The same is true, I think, as regards Pound's anti-semitism, which Leon
sees as a phenomenon of the 1930s and after.  If we think about Pound's
anti-semitism not as an intellectual phenomenon, as Leon does, but rather
as a form of passionate or even religious folly that reflects an
engagement with both real Jews and an imaginary "Jew," then we must be
interested in the 1890s.

And one last thing: the notion that the Nazi genocide of the Jews came as
a surprise to Pound in 1945, which Leon promotes, simply doesn't hold up.
Detailed, accurate, and reliable reports of concentration camps were
available in mainstream American newspapers and radio reports throughout
the 1930s, and news of genocide came as early as 1941 in Yiddish
newspapers in America and then later that year in the New York Times.
The BBC reported in June of 1942 that 700,000 Jews had been murdered by
the Nazis, and news of systematic extermination was available in all of
the major American newspapers and wire services, as well as on the floor
of Congress.  In 1944, American, British, and Swiss newspapers offered
details of gas chambers at Auschwitz.  The news was also spread via
leaflets dropped in Italy by Allied planes.  Even if Pound discounted all
of this as Allied propaganda, we ought to remember that spreading this
news was one of the major activities of Italy's anti-fascist underground,
a movement that Pound was in touch with for much of the war.

Apologies for the length of these remarks, but Leon's book, for which I
waited far too long to read, deserves detailed attention by the best minds
we've got on this list--and some thorough discussion here.

Jonathan Gill
Columbia University