The recent suggestion that we have a panel on teaching Pound, combined
with the appearance of some interesting new voices on this list, makes me
wonder whether we might find some way to include a discussion of this list
(a subject index of submissions since the start would be revealing) and
digital resources in general as part of such a panel, if it were to
happen.
Jonathan Gill
Columbia University
On Tue, 19 Oct 1999, Jonathan Morse 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
>
|
