IV
        How, if at all, can the link between Pound and New Masses help us to
understand the role that race plays in his work? First, this connection
may suggest that during the late 1920s and early 1930s, his view of
African-Americans was, in terms of the cultural context within which he
lived and wrote, relatively progressive.  Among predominantly white
groups in the years around 1930, the Communists were in the vanguard in
their approach to racial politics.  As what we might call a "cultural
fellow-traveler" in the years 1926 to 1932, Pound explicitly
dissociated himself from the Party's economic doctrines; but he never
offered a similar critique of its approach to racial issues, and his
use of the Gellert materials shows that he was willing to learn from
and to adapt for his own purposes race-related materials that the Party
developed.  Pound also accepted the Party position on the most
explosive racial issue of the day, the Scottsboro case.  In a letter to
Langston Hughes printed by D. D. Paige, Pound thanks him for a copy of
"Scottsboro Limited" and suggests that the case demonstrates "that the
extreme Southern states are governed by the worst there is in them"
(Letters 241); and in a November, 1932, letter to Senator Bronson
Cutting, Pound expresses pleasure over "a belated reprieve of seven
black boys for not committing rape" (Pound/Cutting 79).  Aldon Nielsen
tells us that Pound also made "a financial contribution to the British
Scottsboro Defense Committee through its honorary treasurer, Nancy
Cunard" (66).  Nielsen's allusion to Cunard might also remind us that
she and Pound remained friends during the early 1930s, as she entered
the Communist Party and devoted herself almost totally to the cause of
racial justice. And as I have already noted, Pound contributed a short
piece on Frobenius to her monumental and groundbreaking Negro: An
Anthology, published in 1933 (393-4).
        Pound's New Masses connection might even serve to explain if not to
excuse his ubiquitous use of the term "nigger," on which Nielsen
comments at some length (66-8). As we have seen, the songs collected by
Gellert use the term "nigger" freely. If Black people use this term in
speaking of themselves, Pound may have thought, can't White writers use
it also? Is "nigger" a colloquial, earthy, "working class" name for
African-Americans, or is it a demeaning, derogatory "racist" term? The
New Masses writers seem uncertain on this point. Thus New Masses
publishes in installments a play initially called Wharf Nigger but then
the writer and/or the editors apparently decide that this title doesn't
sound quite right, so in a subsequent installment the title becomes On
the Wharf. So too it seems to me quite possible that Pound, cut off
from the American scene during his years in Rapallo, may have concluded
from his readings in publications like New Masses that the term
"nigger" is simply a colloquial alternative to the more socially proper
"Negro." Thus his use of this word may not imply any particular racist
intent.
        At the same time, it must also be acknowledged that Pound's attitude
toward Black people was, like the attitude toward Blacks of New Masses
and of the Communist Party in general, reductive and condescending. As
I have already suggested, the use of a self-consciously mannered
"Negro" idiom in the Gellert texts tends to distance these poems,
render them "Other." A generally accepted set of conventions for
transcribing the "Negro dialect" into the written code allows a
Eurocentric, literate culture to appropriate these African-American,
oral texts for its own purpose.  And Pound accepts this process of
distancing and appropriation without hesitation. He too wants a Black
poetic culture that is safely Other and yet remains available to his
investigation.  For Pound, the earthy idiom of the songs collected by
Gellert becomes an implicit critique of the still relatively "arty"
speech of white radicals, even self-proclaimed proletarians.  In the
presumably more "authentic" because closer both to the speaking voice
and to immediate experience language of Black workers, Pound has
discovered, he believes, an idiom that is "naturally" poetic.
        In the same years in which he was reading New Masses, Pound was, as I
have already noted, also discovering Frobenius, who offered him a fully
developed rationale for a romantic/primitivist view of the African and,
by extension, the African-American world.  Frobenius makes a brief but
telling visit to Canto 38, first published in the New English Weekly in
September 1933:
The ragged arab spoke with Frobenius and told him
The names of 3000 plants.
        Bruhl found some languages full of detail
Words that half mimic action; but
generalization is beyond them, a white dog is
not, let us say, a dog like a black dog. (189)
The ABC of Reading, which also dates from the early 1930s, opens with
Pound's celebration of the superior concreteness of Chinese to English.
Frobenius supported in this opinion by a less marginal figure in the
history of anthropology, Lucien Levy-Bruhl  found a similar
concreteness in the languages and cultures of Africa, both the Arabic
cultures as in the example noted and in the Baluba cultures where, as
Pound had mentioned a few lines previously in Canto 38, "they spell
words with a drum beat."  But in the quoted passage from Canto 38,
Pound acknowledges that such concreteness has its negative side:
"generalization is beyond them."   "We" can generalize, analyze.
"They" cannot.  "We" need to recover a kind of concreteness that
"they" whether Chinese or Arab or Baluba have preserved.  But "we" are
"developed people" capable of running the world, while "they" remain
charmingly primitive.
        I don't want to minimize the potentially destructive consequences of
the kind of romantic primitivism we see in Pound and also, for that
matter, in the writers of New Masses, for all their claims to be
"scientific socialists."  Yet it also seems to me important to preserve
a distinction between this kind of racism and the pathological variety
that infected Pound only a few years after the period I have discussed
here, and that manifests itself in everything he says about Jews from
the mid-1930s until his recantation to Allen Ginsberg in 1967. Whether,
with Casillo, we see Pound's anti-Semitism as the fundamental motive
force behind everything that he said or did, or whether we opt for
Wendy Flory's argument that his anti-Semitism was a relatively
encapsulated mental system created by his devotion to Mussolini,
virtually all readers and students of Pound have come to see his
anti-Semitism as pathological. But I would argue that Pound's view of
the Black world was never, either in the 1930s or later, pathological
in the same way. Both Pound and the Communists who were at least in
part his guides in these matters displayed a condescending attitude
toward Blacks. But the Communists also made an important contribution
to the struggle for racial justice in America: without their work the
Scottsboro Boys surely would have died in the Alabama electric chair
before they reached their 20th birthdays. Pound clearly made no such
contribution to the cause of racial justice, but he was at least
willing to support the Communist reading of the Black/White situation
in America. For this reason I think we should resist the temptation
simply to label Pound as, in some global sense, "a racist."  Rather we
need to say that for an extended period of his life he was given over
to a virulent form of anti-Semitism. But it also seems to me important
to remember, while we are talking about Pound's anti-Semitism, that in
his views of Africans and African-Americans (or, for that matter,
Asians, although I have seen no need to explore this issue here), he
was never a racist in the same way or to the same degree.
        If race itself i.e., the presumed superiority of the "Aryan master
race" over the "lesser breeds without the law" isn't the issue for
Pound, then what IS the issue?  As far as the Jews are concerned, the
issue seems to be a tangled mixture of paranoia about "the banks" not
so uncommon among many varieties of American populists, most of whom
have thought of themselves as "Christian" and a deep suspicion of the
tendency toward abstraction that Pound detected in all varieties of
monotheism, whether Jewish, Christian, or Islamic. By themselves,
either of these ideas may be problematic, but they are not necessarily
pathological.  But in the 1930s, as Italian public discourse
increasingly imitated the racist rhetoric of Nazi Germany, Pound began
to make sweeping generalizations about the Jewish "race," and then
about race in general, and the result was a volatile and poisonous brew
from which he, sadly, chose to drink deeply, in the years after 1934.
In his desire to legitimate his anti-Semitism, Pound at time edged
toward a discourse of White supremacy, a theme that would be picked up
by some of his St Elizabeths disciples in the post-war years. Yet
Pound s investment in such a discourse was, at worst, superficial, as
attested by his unflagging admiration for the achievements of the
Chinese people. And while his attitudes toward Blacks were undoubtedly
condescending, he displays no animus toward them comparable to his
views of Jews. Indeed, as I have here tried to show, for a brief moment
in the early 1930s, Pound, along with certain temporary allies in the
Communist Party, entertained the possibility that African-American
culture might provide some of the energies needed to transform American
poetry, "make it new."