Dear Lady Lee:
 
I welcome your missive, your contribution to this list breathes
in an unexpected freshness... intelligence. I endorse and applaud
your observations re: the members of this list (with a few
exceptions) and their fear of handling living ideas., their obessesion
with the dead. I appreciate your voice and commonsense. I couldn't
help but smile, reading about your visits, wondering that perhaps
you were the "Betsy" of my play, SIXTEEN WORDS FOR WATER...
If you haven't already done so, you can read that play at my new
site. It can be accessed at
 
http://homepages.go.com/~stoneking31/index.html
 
Sincerely yours,
 
Billy Marshall Stoneking
 
 
 
 ----- Original Message -----
From: Everett Lee Lady <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, September 15, 1999 5:36 AM
Subject: Some Personal Observations on Pound
 
 
> Almost forty years ago, I made a decision to put my involvement with
> Ezra Pound behind me.  This was not so much because I thought that
> there was anything wrong about it, but because I decided that it was
> important to find my own path in life and that I did not want to go
> through life primarily thinking of myself as a Poundite.  ("Poundite" was
> the adjective that everyone I knew at that time used.  Now I see that
> "Poundian" has become the preferred form.)
>
> So for forty years, I maintained a pretty firm disinterest in things
> concerning Pound.  I noted the occasional biographies, glanced through
> them in bookstores, looked in the index to see if names I knew (Sheri
> Martinelli, John Chatel, Bill McNaughton) were mentioned (usually, but
> usually briefly), noticed with relief that my own was not.  I threw
> away my letters from Pound, which was just as well because there was
> little of interest in them.  (I do regret, however, not having saved
> the letters from Sheri, which were much more interesting.)   My signed
> copy of KULCHUR got left behind in the library at a commune/school called
> Summerlane in upper New York State.
>
> A few years ago, I decided that maybe it was time to remember that time
> from my past again and to find out what people now know about it which I
> didn't know at the time, to once again become acquainted with
> Pound's thought and see whether I now found any value in it, and to
> understand more about Pound's poetry than I did at the time --- the
> only critical work on the CANTOS then was Hugh Kenner's book, and I
> didn't read even that, since it was part of our mystic as Poundites to
> despise critics.  When Kenner's name came up, Pound would say, "I've
> designated him as the official biographer."   Only recently did I
> discover that the cover of THE POETRY OF EZRA POUND should have read,
> "By Ezra Pound (as told to Hugh Kenner.)"
>
> I have to say that everything I have learned recently has confirmed
> that my decision forty years ago was the correct one.  Nobody seems to
> understand much more about EP than they did when he was in St.
> Elizabeths, and none of the academics who have made a profession out of
> being experts on Pound seem to have any interest in his ideas.
>
> Perhaps that's just as well.  Most of the ideas don't seem to have had
> that much value, and a lot of them were just plain foolish.  A recent
> subject heading on this mailing list was, "Pound's Fatal Flaw," and
> certainly one of EP's fatal flaws was the tendency, once he had
> learned a little bit about a subject, to believe that he was an expert
> on it.  (I tend to have the same flaw myself, and have learned to be
> wary of it.)  The kind of thinking which EP had trained himself in and
> which served him so well as a literary critic did not prove equally
> valuable in investigating questions of economics, government, politics,
> and the like.
>
> Still, you would think that if someone wants to be an expert on Pound,
> such a person would try to understand Pound's thinking and his ideas.
>
> Those who contribute to this list certainly don't seem to know anything
> about the lesson of Agassiz and the fish, for instance.
>
> Reading this list for several weeks now, and looking at several months of
> archived articles, I discover that apparently the most significant
> things about Pound are that he was an anti-semite, that he was (or
> perhaps was not) a Fascist, and was (or perhaps was not) a traitor.
> Oh, and yes, there are some really good lines in his poetry, and he was
> a pretty good literary critic.
>
> The idea seems to be that if we can just find the correct labels to pin
> on him, then we'll understand who the man was.  And so the arguments
> turn on the correct meanings of the labels.  What does "Fascist" really
> mean, what is the correct definition of "treason"?  If we just had, it
> would seem, a sufficiently comprehensive dictionary, then we would
> understand everything about Pound.
>
> In this case, I don't know that I have much to contribute here.  I'm not
> an expert on the meanings of words such as "Fascist," "treason" and the
> like.  It does seem to me that anti-semitism is not primarily a character
> defect, but rather a matter of holding opinions which are based on
> incorrect factual information and reasoning, but I don't know that I want
> to argue the point.  (I live in a part of the world, incidentally ---
> Hawaii --- where ethnic stereotypes and ethnic prejudices are an
> essential part of life.  One may try to be free of them, but one can't
> ignore their existence.)
>
> What information I can give here may be of interest to only a few,
> since it has to do with my actual experience, at the age of 17 and 18,
> of what EP was like.  I am no Pound scholar, nor do I have any interest
> in being one.  I can give you some of my perceptions of the fish, but I
> can't help you in figuring out what labels to pin on him.
>
> It has been suggested that when Pound said, "New York bankers," he meant
> this as a code word for "Jews."  From what I knew of EP, I would say
> that this has it almost backwards.  Yes, anti-semitism was a constant
> background to Pound's conversations (or perhaps it might better to call
> them lectures), but over and over again he stressed that the
> fundamental and number one issue was economics, and in particular the
> monetary system.  I can't claim that this is an actual quote, but I
> think he would have said, "If the country could just gain control over
> its own money, then the Jews would no longer be such a problem, because
> they would have lost their power."   (There was also a suggestion that
> re-introducing Greek and Latin into the nation's schools might be a big
> help in this respect.)
>
> I think that when people read the radio speeches or material such as
> the Agresti letters, with the frequent references to "Jewsevelt,"
> etc., they imagine a strident tone of voice.  In fact, a big part of
> EP's charisma was that he said these sort of things in a quiet voice of
> complete conviction, with a somewhat humorous intonation on words like
> "Jewsevelt," and so on.   He talked about Jews in somewhat the same
> tone that Repblicans today use in talking about Clinton, or Democrats
> in talking about Newt Gingrich.
>
> For the most part, things EP said had a common-sense appeal very
> much like that which would later be characteristic of Ronald Reagan or
> H. Ross Perot.  One can easily see this in books such as THE ABC OF
> READING.
>
> I recently read a suggestion that Pound had set aside certain days of the
> week at St. Elizabeths for literary visitors, and certain others for
> political ones.  This does not correspond to my memory at all.  I
> definitely recall being at the hospital almost every day of the week for
> at least one summer (1957), and every weekend during the school year.
> If some more or less distinguished literary vistor was present, then
> naturally Pound would talk primarily about literature, but mostly what
> he talked about seemed to depend both on his mood and on questions that
> visitors might ask.  I never had any sense that he tried to conceal his
> political views from anyone.  Quite the contrary.
>
> When Kasper and Horton started their publishing company (later renamed
> the Square Dollar Press after Kasper became notorious), Pound did not
> instruct them to publish anti-semitic books.  The only book on their list
> even vaguely of this nature was Mullins's book on the Federal Reserve,
> and anti-semitism was only a minor theme of that book.
>
> Instead, EP had them publish Fenellosa's monograph on the Chinese
> character, Alexander Del Mar's rather curious little book on the history
> of currency, the Analects of Confucious, writings of Louis Agassiz, and
> maybe one of two other books of similar nature.
>
> It is true that someone among the Pound  circle (not EP himself; most
> likely Kasper's ex-girlfriend Nora) gave me a copy of the Protocols and
> a few similar anti-semitic books.  I read them, thought they might
> conceivably be true, although a lot of the arguments were far from
> convincing and some of the claims were quite far-fetched.  In any
> case, I did try being an anti-semite for a while, but after a while
> just got bored with it.  And later on, when I did notice that someone
> among my circle of acquaintances was Jewish, I usually observed that he
> seemed to have pretty much the same interests and concerns as I did.
>
> The things I industriously set about learning as a direct result of
> recommendations from EP were not a matter of right-wing politics or
> anti-semitism.  In addition to the volumes published by the Square
> Dollar Press, mentioned above, I contacted a rare book company and
> bought Thomas Hart Benton's (not the artist, his father) memoir THIRTY
> YEARS IN THE SENATE and Martin van Buren's autobiography.  Benton's
> book consisted mostly of transcripts of Senate debates, and was quite
> fascinating in its way, but I never did figure out what I had been
> intended to learn from it.  Van Buren's autobiography was largely
> devoted to settling some now long-forgotten grievance with some other
> politicians.  (Something about whether his election as Vice-president
> had been valid, as I recall.)   Louis Agassiz's book was mostly devoted
> to disputing the theory of evolution, but I don't think that this was
> EP's concern.
>
> And of course I read THE LAW OF CIVILIZATION AND DECAY by Brooks Adams
> (Henry Adams's older brother), which Pound was constantly recommending.
> I later read Spengler by way of comparison.  It seemed to me that
> although the two were similar, Spengler was more of a philosopher and
> Adams more of a historian.
>
> A few years later, I subscribed to the Congressional Record for at least
> a year.  Pound had always claimed that a lot of the nation's
> muddle-headedness about government might be cleared up if the
> Congressional Record were sold on newstands.  Indeed, reading the
> Record is a fascinating experience, but since it doesn't record the
> work of Committees, one learns only a limited amount from it about the
> legislative process.
>
> The more important way in which EP's influence changed my life was in
> the courses I chose to take in college.  I already knew that I was
> interested in languages, and had had some French and Latin in high
> school.  Because of knowing Pound, and having read the ABC OF READING, I
> now took three years of Greek in college, at which point the Classics
> Department suggested that I might as well apply for a second Bachelor's
> degree in Classics.  (My primary degree was in Mathematics.)  I also took
> three years of German, another year of Latin, and a year of classical
> Chinese.  (Thank god nobody at the universities I went to taught
> Provencal!)
>
> In addition, it was EP's influence that made me satisfy my humanities
> requirement by taking upper level courses in Chinese History and Greek
> and Roman History, rather than some freshman survey courses.
>
> God knows what good any of this ever did me.  But I hope that it will
> indicate that there was a little bit more to Pound's interests and
> ideas than anti-semitism, Fascism, radio speeches, and a few good lines
> of poetry.
>
> --Lee Lady   <Http://www2.Hawaii.Edu/~lady>
>