At 12:30 AM 11/27/99 -0500, you wrote:
>I would like to be directed to the evidence of Pound's "blood-dripping"
racism, as you put it. So far, I've found nothing to indicate that Pound
the wartime counter-propagandist approved (or was even aware) of anything
remotely resembling Ethnic Cleansing or genocide. Or perhaps you meant
something else by "blood-dripping"?
 
I meant that the whole racist mental pathology is dripping with blood,
historically speaking. But as to Pound's awareness, I refer you to
_Letters in Captivity_, letter 49, p. 187. There, after visiting Ezra at
the DTC, Dorothy reports this way about her trip home under chaotic postwar
conditions: " . . . boarded the train, a merce, with cattle trucks for
goyim." About which we can say:
 
1. "Merce," without the grave accent over the last letter, is Italian for
freight train. Elsewhere in the book the word is translated correctly, but
here Omar Pound and Robert Spoo make an interesting Freudian slip: they
render "a merce" as "Thank God!"
 
2. "Goyim" is a Hebrew word meaning "non-Jews." By Jews it's ordinarily
used in a derogatory sense, as the Pounds knew. I.e., Dorothy here is
indulging herself and Ezra in a fairly nasty bit of self-pity, meaning
"They're doing to us what we did to them!" Compare T.S. Eliot's French idol
Charles Maurras, Nazi collaborator. When the court handed down his prison
sentence after the war, he shouted, "C'est la revanche de Dreyfus!"
 
3. Date of Dorothy's letter: November 13, 1945. That's just six months
after General Jodl surrendered to General Eisenhower. Several years later
Sylvia Plath would write, "An engine, an engine, / chuffing me off like a
Jew," but the information was out and available much earlier. It was shown
in the same newsreels where Pound saw Mussolini's battered body, for
instance. Or, if you insist on literary evidence, Vasily Grossman's 1944
eyewitness article "Treblinskii ad" -- the first published account of the
death camps -- was available in a French translation ("L'Enfer de
Treblinka") as of 1945.
 
5. More generally: Daniel Goldhagen's _Hitler's Willing Executioners_ may
not be worth much as history, but the phenomenon of its reception in
Germany is worth a great deal. Well no, not all the Lager were in faraway
Poland; there were some 10,000 concentration camps within Germany. Well
yes, it took a positive effort not to know about those. Goldhagen helped
the generation of the Third Reich admit that at last.
 
6. Pound had no Goldhagen to help him. But he knew.
 
7. See also the recent thread on this list about people who tried to tell
Pound, and compare Marianne Moore's vain effort to get _The Criterion_ to
notice Hitler's persecution of the Jews. How close to the European action
was Moore? Not very. But when did she start saying things that Eliot didn't
want to hear? In 1933.
 
8. None of this is news. But "counter-propagandist"? That rustling noise
you hear is the sound of a political hand being tipped.
 
9. Nevertheless, sursum corda. The text of Pound's own diagnosis is badly
garbled in the old Paige _Selected Letters_ (no. 328, p. 295), but some
meaning does come through the static. "A man can read a thousand or 5000 or
whatever books," says Pound, "but to suppose that they will be the _same_
1000 or 5000 after new treasure is available than there were in 1500 is to
relapse into habit." Pound is talking here about the classics; specifically
Pindar, whom he considers no longer worth reading. Substitute the name
"Kenner" and interesting possibilities arise.
 
Jonathan Morse