At 10:30 AM 11/27/99 -0500, Tim Romano wrote, in part:
 
>I know there are people who think the stories of genocide are all
fabrications. I am not one of them. You don't need to point me to
Goldhagen. You write that "Pound had no Goldhagen to help him. But he
knew." How, when, and what did Pound know? I asked specifically about
Pound's knowledge of Ethnic Cleansing or genocide _during the period of his
wartime broadcasts_. The evidence you have cited does not address the
specific question asked.
 
[JM] Not many details were released during the war, of course, and of
course Pound would automatically have discounted the information publicized
in the United States by Rabbi Stephen Wise. Pound wasn't alone in that
respect, either; the White House and the State Department regarded Wise as
a dangerous embarrassment. But that Hitler meant what he said about the
Jews, and that something very bad indeed was happening to them, was
something knowable almost as a certainty from 1933 on. A recent sample of
the data might include, for instance, Werner Sollors' article "W.E.B. Du
Bois in Nazi Germany: a Surprising, Prescient Visitor," _Chronicle of
Higher Education_ 12 Nov. 1999: B4. Quote from Du Bois: "There is a
campaign of race prejudice carried on, openly, continuously and
determinedly against all non-Nordic races, but specifically against the
Jews, which surpasses in vindictive cruelty and public insult anything I
have ever seen; and I have seen much." Du Bois goes on to warn of an
impending "war on Jews." Date of quotes: 1936.
 
Or, if you prefer testimony from someone more in tune with Pound
politically, I could refer you to Lothrop Stoddard's _Into the Darkness:
Nazi Germany Today_ (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1940). Stoddard, a journalist
with a Harvard Ph.D. in history, shows up in _The Great Gatsby_ as
"Goddard," author of a book about the endangered Nordic race that gets Tom
disturbed. IRL he was one of the prime movers behind the writing and
passage of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, and during the winter
of 1939-40 his credentials as a professional racist got him a VIP tour of
Germany, including interviews with Himmler, Goebbels, and (off the record)
Hitler. These he reports in his book. But he also reports on a visit to a
Jewish family in Berlin -- a family whose members go in daily terror of
their lives. And he notes too -- yes! -- some disturbing rumors he has
heard about activities in the closed zones of Poland.
 
But of course Du Bois published his report in an obscure African-American
newspaper, and I'm not aware of any evidence that Pound read Stoddard. And
no, Italy was not Germany. I'm really not out to blame Pound. At this point
in history that would be pointless, and after all the only suffering Pound
caused was to himself. But I think history's verdict will include the legal
term "constructive knowledge." The adjective there comes from the verb
"construe," and it's usually translated, "He knew or should have known."
 
More, and then I will stop: on this list I've mentioned Pound's unpleasant
habit of haranguing Louis Zukofsky with complaints addressed to the entire
Jewish race. Let me refer to two more items from that categorical
correspondence: letter 89 in _Pound/Zukofsky_ and letter 82 in _"I Cease
Not to Yowl"_. The letter to Zukofsky is a warm, wise thank-you note, full
of gratitude for the violin recital that Zukofsky's son Paul has given on
the lawn of St. Elizabeths. The letter to Olivia Agresti is a retrospect on
the event. It reads:
 
"Mr Zukofsky brot his ten year old son to play Mozart on the lawn a
fortnight ago. ETC. INDIVIDUALS/ BUT......"
 
We can let Jason Compson IV fill in the master's ellipsis. "I have nothing
against jews as an individual," Jason explains in _The Sound and the Fury_.
"It's just the race." Pound's own gloss, immediately following the
ellipsis, is, "I shd/ like to arouse ORA's interest in history/ in biology/
in Luther Burbank, in eugenics/"
 
If you go looking, you'll find a lot more pathography like this: postwar,
prewar, and in between. But isn't this enough? Pound has said "Don't start
a pogrom," but he certainly does entertain some strange thoughts about
ten-year-old boys, doesn't he?
 
And as to us and our reactions: can't we simply accept that Pound's
political "ideas" are only prejudices? If they ever were worth taking
seriously, their own history has discredited them. Some things, as Pound
recognized in the case of Pindar, do go out of date. What's the problem
with acknowledging that?
 
[. . .]
 
>[TR] With respect to Marianne Moore's early relationship with The
Criterion: could you provide the bibliographic details? I will follow them
up. Did Pound read her letters?
 
[JM] Letter to Bryher, 16 May 1933:
 
"I was asked to review something for the July _Criterion_ and though I told
the Secretary not to use it if it is not needed, I sent a short notice of
the Bompiani _Almanacco Letterario 1933_ and mentioned in it Heinrich Mann
and the persecution of 'that ancient and valuable race, the Jews.' (It
sounds as though I thought the Manns Jews -- and I did -- but I believe
they are not?) At the circus I was standing by one of the cages when
Governor Smith came by and though I am not acquainted with him, I ventured
to tell him that we are all grateful for what he has been doing on behalf
of the Jews. I am willing to sign or have you put my name to any paper in
any country protesting against this persecution." (305)
 
But the review wasn't published, and though _The Criterion_ published
Moore's verse, her relationship with Eliot was strained. After meeting him
for the first time she was hurt by what she perceived as his condescension,
and many years later she complained that when he visited New York he
ignored her requests to call. With Pound, though, the friendship was
lifelong. Pound wrote a favorable review of Moore's work in _The Little
Review_ in 1918, then initiated a correspondence which went on to the end.
After the end, too; when Moore died, less than a year before his own death,
Pound arranged a memorial service at the Protestant Church of Venice and
read Moore's "What Are Years?"
 
Moore's side of the Pound correspondence begins, interestingly enough, with
race and religion. "I was born in 1887," she writes to Pound on January 9,
1919, "and brought up in the home of my grandfather, a clergyman of the
Presbyterian church. I am Irish by descent, possibly Scotch also, but
purely Celtic." And race and religion continue to appear in the
correspondence -- usually in the form of exasperated complaints about
Pound's antisemitism. I've already mentioned those onlist, however. And my
source for all of these paragraphs has been _The Selected Letters of
Marianne Moore_, ed. Bonnie Costello, Celeste Goodridge, and Cristanne
Miller (Knopf, 1997).
 
>[TR] When Dorothy refers to her transportation as "cattle trucks for
goyim" she may be expressing a view that Pound had long expressed: that
America and Britain were coming to resemble the degraded conditions in
Russia, whose slave-labor projects, Pound had claimed, were financed by
international capital. Read the broadcasts where he talks about e.e.
cummings's book EIMI, about the author's trip to Russia in the 1930s, and
the other broadcasts where communist Russia is the topic, for examples of
this sort of rhetoric. This is not necessarily an allusion to the cars that
took the Jews to the death camps.
 
[JM] Oh well, let's not talk about the specific term "goyim." Let's not
even wave Occam's Razor. Instead, let's reminisce about the olden days when
pay phones were electromechanical devices that couldn't make a connection
to a free service like 911 or (in those days) 411 unless a dime (yes, a
dime) were inserted first. If all went well you got your dime back when you
hung up.
 
But sometimes all didn't go well. In the classic sketch by Mike Nichols and
Elaine May, a man (Nichols) is in the middle of a 411 call when he hears
his dime fall irretrievably into the telephone's coinbox. That dime, as he
explains to a whole series of information operators (May, May, May, May . .
.), was his last. After 411 gives him the number he needs, he must use it
to make a call on which his entire career depends. To make that call he
needs his dime. THAT dime! He needs THAT dime! He must make his call! And
yes, the telephone did take his dime! It wasn't supposed to, but it did! It
really, really did!
 
And one of the operators replies, "Information cannot argue with a closed
mind."
 
Jonathan Morse