I don't have it to hand but doesn't it go something like "Re: USURY: I was
off base all along, mistaking the symptom for the cause. The cause is
AVARICE"? Does this mean that he abandons his various programmes for the
reform of the currency, or simply that he recognises that reform of the
currency is not a panacea? We seem to be expected to nod assent, as if, with
the benefit of this new insight, the riddle of Pound's thinking on ecomonics
might be solved, and all his maledictions redeemed.
 
On the other hand one might say that the very brevity of Pound's remarks are
a kind of expiation for the diffuseness of what they seek to qualify.
 
"At seventy I realised that instead of being a lunatic, I was a moron":
Pound quoted by Michael Reck in *A conversation between Ezra Pound and Allen
Ginsberg*, Evergreen, June 1968. Did he really say that?
 
Re "apologias" ("apologiae"?) in general, there have of course been plenty
made on Pound's behalf. My personal favourite is Desmond O'Grady's "Was
Pound a fascist? Not in the derogatory sense of that word" (this is from the
first of the *Agenda* special issues, I forget the date). Hmmm...
 
 
Richard Edwards,
London
 
 
 
>From: "Jonathan P. Gill" <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine
>  <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Pound and Ginsberg
>Date: Tue, 7 Sep 1999 15:42:30 -0400
>
>Re Pound, Ginsberg, and apologies:
>
>I find Pound's remarks to Ginsberg most unsatisfactory.  There's not much
>sorrow, regret, or responsibility in the statement.  I pressed Ginsberg on
>this in person several years before his death but never
>prevailed--Ginsberg wasn't very open to new interpretations of the
>conversation.  Then again, perhaps, Ginsberg felt a certain sympathy with
>an aged poet.
>
>Also, let's not forget the apology--an apologia, really, and a very
>revealing one--in the preface to Selected Prose, written months before
>Pound's death, as a way of explaining the decision to include in that
>volume a kind of greatest hits of Pound's intolerance.
>
>Jonathan Gill
>Columbia University
 
______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com