[I've just noticed I missed out a word from the second paragraph of my last
posting so here it is again with the slip amended.]
 
I'm going to leap to Jonathan Morse's defence here. What Morse detects -
correctly I think - in the letter which you quote is an example of what
often happens when a bigoted person learns something which appears to cast
doubt on the validity of his prejudices; he pretends to have known it all
along and then finds some more or less intellectually dishonest method of
explaining it away. Pound's reaction to the news that Del Mar was Jewish is
to pretend to have already "deduced" it for himself (without saying how or
from what). But if he had already "deduced" it why did he need Kasper to
"ascertain" it for him? He either knew it or he didn't. (If "deduced" in
this context means no more than "suspected", it is a mis-use of language and
quite a revealing one at that; one of the bigot's habits of mind is to
pretend that his prejudicial conclusions about people's racial origins have
a logical basis).
 
Pound's next sentence, with its thin pretence of "impartiality", is a piece
of contemptible double-speak. If Pound was really interested in being
impartial, he would have asked himself to what extent his prejudices about
the Jewish "tribe" were consistent with Del Mar's being a member of it.
Instead he takes the easy route out of the quandary: Del Mar is just the
exception that proves the rule.
 
It is a sad reflection on the quality of the Agresti letters that this is
what counts as comic relief. But I suppose it is a bit like seeing the class
bully tripped up by a snare of his own making.
 
 
Richard Edwards
 
 
>From: Everett Lee Lady <[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: Re: Racial or cultural?
>Date: Thu, 21 Oct 1999 02:54:42 -1000
>
>Good God!  It is bad enough that interest in E.P. seems to have become
>largely the province of the kind of academics that EP himself despised,
>and is primarily carried on by means of the sort of thinking that he
>most vehemently condemned.  (In some ways, though, it might be objected
>that the habit of a number of Pound scholars of filtering all
>information through their particular obsessions is in fact quite
>typical of some of Pound's worst thinking patterns on politics and
>similar matters.)
>
>But the level of scholarship shown here (not that I make any claim to
>being a Pound scholar myself) is at times atrociously bad.
>
>If you want to deduce things from Pound's letters, you need to have some
>understanding of how Pound's mind worked and how he communicated,
>otherwise none of your deductions will make any sense.  You also need to
>have some sense of the world he was part of.  Not that you need to
>approve of that world, but if you read things he wrote in 1952 as if they
>were written in 1999, then nothing you conclude will have any value.
>
>And at the very least, you need to be able to READ.
>
> >From:  Jonathan Morse <[log in to unmask]>
> >Subject:      Racial or cultural?
>
>               >SNIP<
>
> >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 Del Mar, the reference is to Letter 100 to Olivia Ressetti
>Agresti:  "... and Kasper has ascertained what I had long deduced, that
>our greatest historian, Del Mar was kike/ AND I shall go on revivifying
>his glorious memory.  NOT that such impartiality will do me any good.
>When ever some jew DOES something useful, his tribesmen let him drop
>hotter than a goy/"
>
>Professor Morse has written "Pound belately learns."  The actual letter
>from Pound says, "what I had long [since] deduced."
>
>Professor Morse apparently implies that learning that Del Mar was
>Jewish caused Pound to condemn him.  (If this is not what Morse meant
>to imply, I don't know what the point of his comment is.)  The letter
>actually says, "I shall go on revivifying his glorious memory."  Does
>anybody need a dictionary to understand the meaning of "revivifying"?
>(Not to mention "glorious"!)
>
>Of course, in a way this is all beside the point, since there are plenty
>of passages in the Agresti letters which uncontestably illustrate the
>fact (which I already knew from my own knowledge of the man) that Pound
>was intensely anti-semitic.  But it does make me inclined to distrust any
>information that comes from Professor Morse.  This is not the first
>instance in which it seems unmistakable to me that he has clearly
>misinterpreted Pound's words in the Agresti letters, but it's the most
>blatant.
>
>As to Kasper....  I guess it's probably understandable that nobody
>considers it worthwhile to go back and search out the truth about John
>Kasper.  Certainly the truth would not vindicate him.  He deserved all
>the condemnations that were directed toward him and all the punishment
>that fell his way.  And yet the judgements that people made at the time,
>and which Pound scholars today accept uncritically, were simplistic and
>missed the point of who he was.
>
>As I say, Kasper was no innocent who was unjustly condemned.  And yet at
>the same time, I think that he was a convenient fall guy for the many
>supporters and opponents of school de-segregation who wanted to
>blame the disturbances in Clinton and Knoxville, TN. on an "outside
>agitator."  Mostly what Kasper did, from what I knew, was simply let
>people know about the plans for desegregation which the governments in
>question were trying to keep quiet.  The public reaction in the local
>communities to this information was predictable.
>
>In the years since then, I have lived through times in which there have
>been many different sorts of riots, both leftist and rightist, against
>government policies, and I have never seen any convincing evidence that
>any of them were actually caused by "outsider agitators," although
>there are almost always interested parties that want to promote that
>claim.
>
>By the time I arrived on the grounds of St. Elizabeths in the winter of
>1955-56 (as near as I can figure out the dates at this point), Kasper was
>already arrested and about to stand trial.  I met him only once (he was
>out on bail) and then only briefly.  I knew his ex-girlfriend Nora quite
>well, but my sense of the sort of person Kasper was comes mostly from
>more publically available information.  (Charles Norman seems to have had
>at least a little bit more knowledge than most.)
>
>Kasper, in my understanding, was a wannabe intellectual who was
>enthusiastic about Pound.  From the public accounts of the discussion
>groups he held at his Make It New bookstore in New York, it seems clear
>that he was attracted (in some general sense, I don't mean sexually) to
>Negros, just as many bohemian intellectuals at that time were.  (Norman
>Mailer, of course, later wrote a famous essay called "The White Negro.")
>
>As a person enthusiastic about Pound's ideas and who had read all the
>right books, Kasper satisfied all the prerequisites for being welcome on
>the grounds of St. Elizabeths.
>
>When Kasper chose a venue for putting "ideas into action," this venue was
>the segregationist movement in the South.  There's no indication at all
>that Pound suggested this to him, and there's a little information
>suggesting that Pound had a lot of doubts about Kasper's choice of a
>political forum.  The "Negro Question" was not Pound's issue of choice.
>
>From my many visits to St. Elizabeths, I recall Pound referring to
>Kasper's activities twice.  The first time, when someone brought the
>topic up, I was quite curious to find out what Pound's attitudes were
>towards his "disciple's" notorious activities.  He definitely didn't
>condemn them, but he also seemed vaguely uncomfortable about the subject
>(or at least this was my perception).  I remember him saying something
>like, "I hope he's managing to find some time to educate people about
>economics and the monetary system."
>
>This attitude is echoed in Letter 118 to Agresti, p.243:  "Kasper's
>REAL ideology is so far above ANY [illegible deletion] U.S. audience/
>and am not sure it is useful to spread it among those who will NOT
>understand why Lincoln was shot (i.e.  for understanding what Jeff.
>wrote to Crawford in 1816.)  [The editor has a footnote here referring
>back to letter 70.  Without chasing this down, I will simply comment
>that Pound believed that John Wilkes Booth had been in the pay of the
>bankers, who thought that Lincoln needed to be killed because he had
>caused currency to be issued which was not backed by precious metal nor
>by the credit of banks, but simply backed by the credit of the United
>States government.  In my opinion, anyone who needs this explained has
>no business being a Pound scholar.  I am not, however, claiming that
>there was any merit in Pound's belief.]
>
>Pound did definitely support segregation (primarily of the public school
>system).  But he certainly did not hate Negros, and in fact had much
>affection towards them, as shown numerous places in his writings.
>(Whether he respected them as equals is much less clear.  There's
>certainly some reason to suspect that he did not.)   Pound believed that
>segregation was actually in the best interest of Negros.  Kasper also
>preached this point of view on a number of occasions, although there may
>have been other occasions when he preached a more blatant racial hatred;
>I don't know one way or another.
>
>Pound and Kasper believed that integration was a Jewish conspiracy, and
>pointed to the fact (referred to obliquely in the Agresti letters) that
>the chairman of the board of the NAACP was Arthur Spingarn, a Jew.
>
>Pound did not talk a whole lot about the Negro Question, however.  The
>one other thing I remember him saying was that it was stupid for Negros
>to direct their efforts toward becoming like Whites, because they at best
>that approach would result in their becoming second-class Whites.
>
>In this respect, Pound's attitude, and at least some of what Kasper was
>preaching, foreshadowed such later ideas such a Black Power and the
>"Black Is Beautiful" slogan.  But of course Pound had no real interest in
>helping Blacks find ways of empowering themselves.  For practical
>purposes, his attitudes, and a fortiori the preachings of Kasper, would
>simply have resulted in keeping Blacks in the position of inferiority
>which they had at the time.
>
>--Lee Lady   <Http://www2.Hawaii.Edu/~lady>
 
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