Jonathan,
 
I very much appreciate your providing this material to the list.
==Dan Pearlman
 
At 02:24 AM 10/19/99 -1000, you wrote:
>At 02:25 AM 10/18/99 -1000, Tim Romano wrote, regarding Tim Bray's phrase
>"tribal hate":
>>
>>. . . I have not encountered anything that I would regard as racial or
tribal
>>hatred in Pound's writings, though I've yet to read the Agresti letters and
>>am not very far into Pound's wartime radio broadcasts, and maybe there is
>>evidence of this kind of hatred to be found in the things I haven't read
>>yet. In one of his wartime broadcasts, Pound actually speaks out against the
>>physical stereotyping of the Japanese in Zukor's animated cartoons.
>>
>>In what I have read of his, Pound's "anti-Semiticism" is
>>culturally/economically based.
>
>The Agresti letters will convince you about the racial hatred, but they
>were written from St. Elizabeths and they're the products of a mind pretty
>far gone. On the other hand, consider the letter that Leon Surette, in his
>latest post, regards as the beginning of the whole mess: no. 64 in Barry
>Ahearn's _Pound/Zukofsky_, dated May 6 and 7, 1934.
>
>You'll recall: Zukofsky, who seems to have suffered from a degree of
>_juedische Selbsthass_, had sent Pound a copy of _Liberation_, a
>publication edited by the American fascist and antisemite William Dudley
>Pelley. The present wasn't received in the spirit in which it was sent,
>though, because Pound believed what Pelley had to say. In this letter, you
>can see the road-to-Damascus experience occurring between one sentence and
>the next.
>
>In the sentence that Leon would probably place on the safe side of the
>abyss, Pound asks, "I spose Mr Pelley will be annoyed wiff me fer askin if
>all bankers iz jooz? just like Moike iz." We're to read that question as
>sardonic, since (as Ahearn notes) the name "Moike" probably refers to the
>Communist writer Mike Gold, author of a fictionalized 1930 autobiography
>called _Jews Without Money_. Pound's tone up to this point has been heavily
>self-congratulatory about tolerance and some-of-my-best-friends-iz-jooz;
>the letter's first sentence reads, "WAAL, waaal, whood choose deh jews/ an
>teh think I got one a cuttin stone on my roof!!!" Not for the James
>Whitcomb Riley persona of that sentence is the snobbish wit of the poem it
>has in mind, W. N. Ewer's "How odd / Of God / To choose / The Jews." But
>halfway down the page the tone changes.
>
>It begins right after the point about not all bankers being Jews, and it
>comes out as just two little words, this way.
>
>"I spose Mr Pelley will be annoyed wiff me fer askin if all bankers iz
>jooz? just like Moike iz. but still."
>
>And (if Leon is right) off we go from there. By the next day, May 7, Pound
>is lecturing the poverty-stricken Zukofsky:
>
>"Seriously, yew hebes better wake up to econ///why don't the rabinical
>college start delousing the Am/ Univ. system the suppression of history etc.
>
>"Speakin to you aza anti-semite?
>"If you don't want to be confused with yr/ ancestral race and pogromd . . .
>it wd/ be well to modernize / cease the intrauterine mode of life/ come
>forth by day etc." [Ellipsis in original]
>
>That word "intrauterine" reflects Canto XXXV, of course --
>
>the intramural, the almost intravaginal warmth of
>hebrew affections
>
>-- so (since XXXV predates this letter) we can assume that Pound's
>avalanche of free associations ending in "etc." was just waiting for the
>right tremor to start its fall. In any case, it would appear that by 1934
>at the latest, the economic component of Pound's antisemitism was only the
>superstructure over a racist base.
>
>Jonathan Morse
>Co-editor, H-Net list H-Antisemitism
>
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