There seems to me to be a lot of sense in Kevin Kiely's views about the Rome
broadcasts. They are not texts for close reading. They represent a part of
the Pound story which is in a sense tragic, in another sense appallingly
banal. Pound's delight in Mussolini's supposed knowledge of and insight into
the Cantos - "MA QVESTO said the Boss, e divertente / catching the point
before the aesthetes had got there" - is simply *stupid*. Even Lord Haw Haw
seems to have found Pound's rants impossibly boring (I'm referring to the
bit in Carpenter's biography describing the Pound/Haw Haw correspondence).

Poor Pound. I wish he hadn't gone down that route. What more is there to
say?

Richard Edwards

>From: kevinkkiely <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: - Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine
>    <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Wei's molehill?
>Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2000 19:48:49 +0100
>
>As the list-member who claims to have interjected the Hitler/Joan of Arc
>quote from Pound into the list's mail, who now wishes to comment on/to Lin
>Wei
>1. Pound quotes Pirandello's being anti-Freud while commenting on Cocteau,
>so perhaps there is no use in applying Freud to Pound? Jung is quoted by
>Pound in his introduction to a selection from the Cantos, so perhaps
>putting
>Pound through Jung's sieve is valid?
>2. You really made a mountain out of a molehill re Pound's feisty comment
>"Hitler was a Jeanne d'Arc, a saint. He was a martyr." Pound's broadcasting
>was driven primarily by his personal reaction to the war & his adulation of
>Mussolini (having had an audience with him in 1933) and prior to that
>having
>written some 'fan letters' to Il Duce including advice re economics etc.
>
>The fact that Pound believed that both Axis dictators (Hit & Muss) actually
>had any interest in Confucius is daftness on his part. Mussolini claimed to
>have read some of the Cantos and Pound was very pleased if not overwhelmed.
>However much later, in desperation Pound began broadcasting, and the tone
>of
>the broadcasts is desperate throughout with the exception of a few for
>instance the one on Joyce; if he had been tanked up on whiskey during
>broadcasts he might have been less inflamatory by being less intelligible
>and certainly what he hates he makes plain and clear, but anyone can see it
>all comes "from the heat oppressed brain" rather than his better self.
>
>He may have felt silenced by the war and did feel snubbed by the US
>government when prior to the outbreak of war, having made an effort to
>speak
>with President Roosevelt instead speaking with Secretary Wallace. Poets and
>such writers broadcasting, has become a brief of the present List member
>who
>is completing the biography of Francis Stuart, the Irish poet/novelist who
>broadcast on Berlin radio 1940-44 along with Lord Haw Haw and others.
>Stuart's first wife Iseult Gonne (daughter of Maud Gonne) was the mistress
>of Pound & also Wyndham Lewis. Writers such as Pound & Stuart broadcast for
>the Axis powers in an effort to seek personal martyrdom, alienation,
>repudiation and ultimately the insights of the outsider which are part of
>the complex personality of such persons. Hence, all of Pound's remarks on
>Rome radio can be seen in the light of the rebel bawling at the world or
>trying to, undignified and dangerous as it was, if not callously inciteful
>to the greater evils of the war.
>
>Then naturally Pound would blurt out such dissonances as the one about
>Hitler & Joan of Arc; and stand on board the liner Cristoforo Colombo and
>allow himself to be photographed giving the fascist salute having arriving
>in Naples after his release from St Elizabeth's in 1958. He also told
>reporters then, that "All America is an insane asylum". It is obvious that
>Pound had 'mental breakdowns' if not before the war then certainly at Pisa
>after his capture; this is not to denigrade his writings as those of a
>madmen, far from it, he paid dearly for his writings in passing through the
>veil of madness and returning, perhaps as T.S. Eliot claimed, "neither
>sane,
>nor insane" but anyway by whose standards of normalcy. So your extended but
>interesting prolixity re Pound's Hitler/Joan of Arc comment tended to the
>obsessive and the redundant. Similarly with Pound and those who abhor him,
>come across as phobic and tending to racism like himself; those who take
>his
>best work from the dross he produced are the wisest, who recognise the best
>Cantos from the worst and the latter far outweight the former, however
>Pound
>tends to have his idolators who see him as a scholargod and a masterpoet
>throughout like Shakespeare & Browning. Yes his best poems are great stuff
>but not the secondary work which stinks of the lamp.

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