There are a few particular angles to this issue that I'm interested in. The
first is how Pound's anti-Semitism interacted with the anti-Semitism of his
environment and his desire to be accepted there. The second is whether
there is some meaningful system or development detectable in his work. The
third would be whether there are some parallels visible in the first and
second angles. And finally, the fourth is whether Joyce's book had any
influence on this issue. In his review of Joyce, Pound indicated that he
was aware of the prototype of the wandering Jew (Selected Essays). Eliot's
Jew was profoundly influenced by Joyce. There is also a parable in one of
Pound's essays which suggests that Pound has the wisdom not to be
simplistically and generally anti-Semitic, so that the first angle appears
to me to be very important:
consider the Victory of Samothrace and the Taj of Agra. The man who carved
the one and the man who designed the other may either or both of them have
looked like an ape, or like two apes respectively. They may have looked
like other apelike or swinelike men. We have the Victory and the Taj to
witness that there was something within them differing from the contents of
apes and of other swinelike men. Thus we learn that humanity is a species
or genus of animals capable of a variation that will produce the desire for
a Taj or a Victory, and moreover capable of effecting that Taj or Victory
in stone. We know from other testimony of the arts and from ourselves that
the desire often overshoots the power of efficient presentation; we
therefore conclude that other members of the race may have desired to
effect a Taj or a Victory. We even suppose that men have desired to effect
more beautiful things although few of us are capable of forming any precise
mental image of things, in their particular way, more beautiful than this
statue or this building. So difficult is this that no one has yet been able
to effect a restoration for the missing head of the Victory. At least no
one has done so in stone, so far as I know. Doubtless many people have
stood opposite the statue and made such heads in their imagination.
(Selected Essays., p. 44)
The parable indicates that Pound is capable of being unracist at a
fundamental humanist level. Why he was nevertheless anti-Semitic (which he
admits to and regrets, to Hugh Kenner in The Pound Era) is hard to guess,
but I find the economic reason plausible (he frequently expressed his
hatred of Eliot's occupation at the bank and tried to get him out of it -
but Eliot didn't really want to), as well as Pound's desire to belong in
Italy, or at least to retain his self-made Paradiso over there in his
little not quite ivory tower.
Arwin
> When Casillo's book came out there was an uproar among angered
>Poundians, so it's interesting so see it recommended so strongly now. I
>for one found the book very interesting and informative, but of very
>limited value in the end. For one thing, Casillo fails to historicize
>Pound's anti-Semitism, which is a crucial error. After all, even if we
>may think Pound's anti-Semitism was one thing, he certainly gave
>expression to it in a variety of ways over the years. In addition, I
>think Casillo treats anti-Semitism itself as if it were the same
>throughout history, underestimating the role that Christianity, Islam,
>racial pseudoscience, 19th-century pogroms, fascism, the Holocaust, and
>the Civil Rights movement in America play in shaping attitudes towards
>Jews and Judaism. The problem, I think, is that Casillo is stuck in an
>early-20th-century anthropological-psychoanalytic-mythic mode in
>which atemporal, acultural forces inspire the same fears and hatreds
>throughout the ages everywhere. Moreover, there is almost no sense in
>Casillo of the way in which anti-Semitism or the figure of the Jew has a
>literary function, beyond mere thematics.
>
>In the end, I'm with the Poundians who don't like Casillo's book, not
>merely because he thinks Pound's an anti-Semite (of course he is!) but
>because Casillo seems to misunderstand the passage that his title quotes.
>Fear makes us construct genealogies of demons--let's not make studies of
>Pound's anti-Semitism into just such the project Pound warns against
>in this canto.
>
>As for the review of the Talmud appearing on the same page as a review of
>(I think) A Lume Spento, I'm not so much interested in the particular
>passages that might have caught Pound's attention as much as the way in
>which the methods and the content of the Talmud was so deeply, if
>indirectly, implicated in Pound's writing.
>
>Jonathan Gill
>Columbia University
>
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