At 02:25 AM 10/18/99 -1000, Tim Romano wrote, regarding Tim Bray's phrase
"tribal hate":
>
>. . . I have not encountered anything that I would regard as racial or tribal
>hatred in Pound's writings, though I've yet to read the Agresti letters and
>am not very far into Pound's wartime radio broadcasts, and maybe there is
>evidence of this kind of hatred to be found in the things I haven't read
>yet. In one of his wartime broadcasts, Pound actually speaks out against the
>physical stereotyping of the Japanese in Zukor's animated cartoons.
>
>In what I have read of his, Pound's "anti-Semiticism" is
>culturally/economically based.
 
The Agresti letters will convince you about the racial hatred, but they
were written from St. Elizabeths and they're the products of a mind pretty
far gone. On the other hand, consider the letter that Leon Surette, in his
latest post, regards as the beginning of the whole mess: no. 64 in Barry
Ahearn's _Pound/Zukofsky_, dated May 6 and 7, 1934.
 
You'll recall: Zukofsky, who seems to have suffered from a degree of
_juedische Selbsthass_, had sent Pound a copy of _Liberation_, a
publication edited by the American fascist and antisemite William Dudley
Pelley. The present wasn't received in the spirit in which it was sent,
though, because Pound believed what Pelley had to say. In this letter, you
can see the road-to-Damascus experience occurring between one sentence and
the next.
 
In the sentence that Leon would probably place on the safe side of the
abyss, Pound asks, "I spose Mr Pelley will be annoyed wiff me fer askin if
all bankers iz jooz? just like Moike iz." We're to read that question as
sardonic, since (as Ahearn notes) the name "Moike" probably refers to the
Communist writer Mike Gold, author of a fictionalized 1930 autobiography
called _Jews Without Money_. Pound's tone up to this point has been heavily
self-congratulatory about tolerance and some-of-my-best-friends-iz-jooz;
the letter's first sentence reads, "WAAL, waaal, whood choose deh jews/ an
teh think I got one a cuttin stone on my roof!!!" Not for the James
Whitcomb Riley persona of that sentence is the snobbish wit of the poem it
has in mind, W. N. Ewer's "How odd / Of God / To choose / The Jews." But
halfway down the page the tone changes.
 
It begins right after the point about not all bankers being Jews, and it
comes out as just two little words, this way.
 
"I spose Mr Pelley will be annoyed wiff me fer askin if all bankers iz
jooz? just like Moike iz. but still."
 
And (if Leon is right) off we go from there. By the next day, May 7, Pound
is lecturing the poverty-stricken Zukofsky:
 
"Seriously, yew hebes better wake up to econ///why don't the rabinical
college start delousing the Am/ Univ. system the suppression of history etc.
 
"Speakin to you aza anti-semite?
"If you don't want to be confused with yr/ ancestral race and pogromd . . .
it wd/ be well to modernize / cease the intrauterine mode of life/ come
forth by day etc." [Ellipsis in original]
 
That word "intrauterine" reflects Canto XXXV, of course --
 
the intramural, the almost intravaginal warmth of
hebrew affections
 
-- so (since XXXV predates this letter) we can assume that Pound's
avalanche of free associations ending in "etc." was just waiting for the
right tremor to start its fall. In any case, it would appear that by 1934
at the latest, the economic component of Pound's antisemitism was only the
superstructure over a racist base.
 
Jonathan Morse
Co-editor, H-Net list H-Antisemitism