Jonathan,
I am trying to understand Pound's CONSCIOUS MOTIVES with respect to issues
of race and culture. His ideology. So I place more weight on passages where
Pound seems to be more careful and reflective than on passages where he
seems to be blurting out one of the unthinking fears and prejudices that
were no doubt growing like kudzu in his unconsious mind. By contrast, you
seem to regard the letters and offhand remarks as the keys with which to
unlock that mind in order to see what was really going on BENEATH its
self-reflective surface.  The whole truth being better than the partial
truth, both approaches are necessary.
 
I think we must mean different things by "race" for I don't understand why
you regard Leopold Bloom's reckoning up the tidy sum from the empty bottles,
to which Lewis refers, as a racial, not a cultural, stereotype. And we also
may differ in our definition of "racist". For me a racist is one who ranks
races as relatively superior or inferior. (I understand a cultural
supremacist to be one who ranks cultures as relatively superior or
inferior.) In the letter to Williams, I understand Pound to be referring to
the American people as a breeding population whose stock has been weakened
due to a lack of acceptable variety in its strains. (I use the phrase
"_acceptable_ variety" to describe what I believe to have been Pound's
attitude.) Are eugenists de facto racists in your view? What do you
understand "the disease" to be?
Tim Romano
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: Jonathan Morse <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, 21 Oct 1999 1:27 AM
Subject: Racial or cultural?
 
 
> At 07:46 AM 10/19/99 -1000, Tim Romano wrote:
>
> >I will be on the lookout for "a racist base" as I read further in the
radio
> >broadcasts, the Zukofsky letters, and then the Agresti.  It is
interesting
> >to compare "the intramural, the almost intravaginal warmth of hebrew
> >affections" with Joyce's ULYSSES and then to refer to the critique by
> >Wyndham Lewis of that novel's depiction of the Jew, Leopold Bloom. I
posted
> >an excerpt of the Lewis piece here not long ago. These are
<i>cultural</i>
> >not <i>racial</i> stereotypes.
>
> They're racial stereotypes.
>
> 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 the young Pound:
>
> In 1920 Pound writes to William Carlos Williams, "I don't care a
fried ----
> about nationality. Race is probably real. It is real." And from there he
> goes on to say, "There is a blood poison in America [. . .] but you
haven't
> a drop of the cursed blood in you, and you don't need to fight the disease
> day and night; you never have had to. Eliot has it perhaps worse than I
> have -- poor devil." And why, specifically, isn't the future author of _In
> the American Grain_ really an American? Because "You [Williams] have the
> advantage of arriving in the milieu with a fresh flood of Europe in your
> veins, Spanish, French, English, Danish." (Paige, _Selected Letters
> 1907-1941_, no. 170)
>
> Of course Williams was born in the USA. But of course, too, Pound thought
> of the word "race" in the ordinary fin-de-siecle way. If you're
interested,
> you can probably pin down the cognate usages by looking through a book
(any
> book) by H.G. Wells -- or, for that matter, by looking through Frank
> Norris's _The Octopus_, whose hero spends his time receiving extra-sensory
> communications via his Anglo-Saxon blood. But for a specific Pound
example,
> all you have to do is open Paige again and look at letter 73.
>
> The subject of that 1915 letter is the first consequential review in the
> United States of Robert Frost's first book. This appeared in a major
> newspaper, _The Boston Evening Transcript_, it was highly favorable, and
it
> marked a turning point in Frost's career. Frost recognized that, and he
did
> his best to butter the reviewer up, addressing him as a fellow poet and
> inviting him up to the farm. In Lawrance Thompson's account the incident
is
> pretty disgusting, because the reviewer, William Stanley Braithwaite, was
> black, and Frost had all the prejudices of his Copperhead father. Compared
> to Frost's behavior -- sycophantic to Braithwaite's face, venomous behind
> his back -- Pound's attitude has at least the merit of being
> straightforward. Still, how does Pound refer to Braithwaite?
>
> This way: "your (?negro) reviewer."
>
> You get the idea.
>
> As to the middle-period letter to Zukofsky that we've been talking about:
>
> Of course this is an informal communication, probably banged out without
> much thought. If Pound had revised it for publication, for instance, he
> would probably have caught his elementary failure to distinguish the
> propositions "All bankers are Jews" and "All Jews are bankers." Still (as
> to Pound's specific concerns), Louis Zukofsky had no connection with any
> bank, no connection with any rabbinical organization, no connection with
> any university, no money, and no power. He wasn't even a gynecologist. And
> Pound was perfectly aware of all that -- at least with the part of his
mind
> that thought. But when he wrote to Zukofsky he covered his brain with his
> James Whitcomb Riley coonskin cap (so much for fighting the American
> disease), addressed him in the plural as "yew hebes," and ordered him to
> "cease the intrauterine mode of life." He refused to see Zukofsky as an
> individual, and that means he couldn't possibly understand him as a member
> of a culture -- any culture.
>
> Well, when Ross Perot addressed the NAACP as "you people" he got put in
his
> place. Of course Ross Perot isn't a great poet, and Ezra Pound was. But
> let's not confuse the greatness of Pound's art with any aspect of his
> thought.
>
> Jonathan Morse
>
>