At 07:46 AM 10/19/99 -1000, Tim Romano wrote:
 
>I will be on the lookout for "a racist base" as I read further in the radio
>broadcasts, the Zukofsky letters, and then the Agresti.  It is interesting
>to compare "the intramural, the almost intravaginal warmth of hebrew
>affections" with Joyce's ULYSSES and then to refer to the critique by
>Wyndham Lewis of that novel's depiction of the Jew, Leopold Bloom. I posted
>an excerpt of the Lewis piece here not long ago. These are <i>cultural</i>
>not <i>racial</i> stereotypes.
 
They're racial stereotypes.
 
It's easy enough to demonstrate that Pound in his last phase was a racist
through and through. We could drop the name "Kasper," for instance. Or, if
you want some comic relief from a very sad book, page through the Agresti
letters and watch what happens when Pound belatedly learns that Alexander
Del Mar was Jewish.
 
As to the young Pound:
 
In 1920 Pound writes to William Carlos Williams, "I don't care a fried ----
about nationality. Race is probably real. It is real." And from there he
goes on to say, "There is a blood poison in America [. . .] but you haven't
a drop of the cursed blood in you, and you don't need to fight the disease
day and night; you never have had to. Eliot has it perhaps worse than I
have -- poor devil." And why, specifically, isn't the future author of _In
the American Grain_ really an American? Because "You [Williams] have the
advantage of arriving in the milieu with a fresh flood of Europe in your
veins, Spanish, French, English, Danish." (Paige, _Selected Letters
1907-1941_, no. 170)
 
Of course Williams was born in the USA. But of course, too, Pound thought
of the word "race" in the ordinary fin-de-siecle way. If you're interested,
you can probably pin down the cognate usages by looking through a book (any
book) by H.G. Wells -- or, for that matter, by looking through Frank
Norris's _The Octopus_, whose hero spends his time receiving extra-sensory
communications via his Anglo-Saxon blood. But for a specific Pound example,
all you have to do is open Paige again and look at letter 73.
 
The subject of that 1915 letter is the first consequential review in the
United States of Robert Frost's first book. This appeared in a major
newspaper, _The Boston Evening Transcript_, it was highly favorable, and it
marked a turning point in Frost's career. Frost recognized that, and he did
his best to butter the reviewer up, addressing him as a fellow poet and
inviting him up to the farm. In Lawrance Thompson's account the incident is
pretty disgusting, because the reviewer, William Stanley Braithwaite, was
black, and Frost had all the prejudices of his Copperhead father. Compared
to Frost's behavior -- sycophantic to Braithwaite's face, venomous behind
his back -- Pound's attitude has at least the merit of being
straightforward. Still, how does Pound refer to Braithwaite?
 
This way: "your (?negro) reviewer."
 
You get the idea.
 
As to the middle-period letter to Zukofsky that we've been talking about:
 
Of course this is an informal communication, probably banged out without
much thought. If Pound had revised it for publication, for instance, he
would probably have caught his elementary failure to distinguish the
propositions "All bankers are Jews" and "All Jews are bankers." Still (as
to Pound's specific concerns), Louis Zukofsky had no connection with any
bank, no connection with any rabbinical organization, no connection with
any university, no money, and no power. He wasn't even a gynecologist. And
Pound was perfectly aware of all that -- at least with the part of his mind
that thought. But when he wrote to Zukofsky he covered his brain with his
James Whitcomb Riley coonskin cap (so much for fighting the American
disease), addressed him in the plural as "yew hebes," and ordered him to
"cease the intrauterine mode of life." He refused to see Zukofsky as an
individual, and that means he couldn't possibly understand him as a member
of a culture -- any culture.
 
Well, when Ross Perot addressed the NAACP as "you people" he got put in his
place. Of course Ross Perot isn't a great poet, and Ezra Pound was. But
let's not confuse the greatness of Pound's art with any aspect of his
thought.
 
Jonathan Morse