Several other people have responded already to this message.  But I still
find things I find it important to say, which will serve as responses to
and comments on a number of recent messages.
 
>Date:  Sat, 16 Oct 1999 10:16:07 -1000
>From:  Garrick Davis <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject:      Re: Poundian Criticism (An Overview)
 
             >SNIP<
 
>No. These scholars wish to criticize Pound because of his life, and more
>particularly his political sympathies. Thus, the poet has been re-evaluated
>on the basis of moral criteria, which in the realm of literary judgment, is
>the oldest fallacy. Today Pound is guilty of fascism and antisemitism, as
>Paul Verlaine was guilty of sexual immorality, as Oscar Wilde was guilty of
>sodomy, etc. The moral fallacy only demonstrates the fact that a writer's
>life and work are not synonymous: a fact that critics were well aware of, but
>the interloping scholars were not.
>
>The use of the moral fallacy by our Poundian scholars only emphasizes their
>unfitness to be critics. For the basis of the poet's reputation is his
>poetry, and not his life. So why was this improper denigration of the poet
>pursued? It must be admitted that some Poundian scholars were highly
>uncomfortable with the poet's canonical position in American letters, simply
>because he was a fascist and an antisemite. Their criteria for literary
>greatness included a test of political sympathies, a test which Pound (and
>Robert Frost, and T.S. Eliot, and W.B. Yeats) failed.
 
Well, I have to disagree, because of the fact that Pound was in his
CANTOS primarily a moral and political poet.  As we know, he at times
complained about those who were interested in the CANTOS primarily for
the "beauty spots," ignoring the important moral and political messages.
 
Now except for a few spots, and in particular the "Lost" Italian Cantos
(which I admit I have not looked at, because the editions I have don't
contain them), there's not all that much Fascism and anti-semitism in the
CANTOS.  However I think that Pound's personal beliefs are a legitimate
cause to have doubts about the moral point of view around which so much
of the CANTOS is organized.
 
Pound's anti-semitism is (or at least used to be) in large part
commonplace and neither original nor especially interesting.  I think
that most people, and in particular many of the contributors to this
list, are guilty of exactly the same sort of attitudes, except that their
targets are more socially acceptable:  targets such as Christian
Fundamentalists and the Religious Right, Hare Krishnas and Moonies,
Southerners (within the United States) and also (from a different point
of view) Californians, communists (although that prejudice has become
fairly outdated), abortionists (now also oudated in large part), White
supremacists and anti-semites, sexual deviants, prostitutes, drug
dealers, academics (one of my own pet prejudices), various sorts of
Arabs (especially Iranians and Iraqis), the Roma (Gypsies), various
sort of foreign aliens (Pakistanis, for instance, in the U.K., Cubans
and Columbians in Florida, Samoans in Hawaii) etc.
 
It seems to be a basic trait of us human beings to have attitudes about
groups of people on a different bases from the way we develop our
attitudes about people we know, and to demonize those groups whose
activities or beliefs we disagree with.  It seems to be extremely
difficult for us to accept the idea that those who have beliefs or are
engaged in activites we disapprove of or who have different culture
values are nonetheless often perfectly decent human beings.
 
My experiences with various groups politically aligned in some way with
Pound or some of his supporters was an eye opener in this respect, as I
discovered that many segregationists, who I had always been taught to
think of as stupid ignorant Southerners, were in fact intelligent,
thoughtful people, who agreed that the way Negroes [thanks to Jonathan
Morse for the spelling correction!] were treated (and not only in the
South!) was unfair and needed to be changed, but disagreed with the
solutions being imposed on them by the Federal government at the
expense (as they saw it) of their children.
 
Later on in life, I got to know members of many of the outlaw groups I
have listed above, and in all cases found that although there was some
validity to accepted stereotypes, at the same time it was a mistake to
assume that stereotypes are valid for individuals.
 
It was only recently that I learned that Charlie Chaplin and Yul
Brynner, for instance, were members of the Roma (Gypsies).
Unfortunately, I've forgotten a number of other notable examples in field
such as science.
 
In this way, Pound's anti-semitism was fairly banal, although that
attitude has now become quite unfashionable (at least in the United
States, and let's hope it remains so!)
 
However Pound's anti-semitism was exceptional in its extremity, in its
conspiratorial nature, and in the extent to which it was an obsession for
Pound.  I don't much approve of psychoanalyzing dead people, but one
can't but help see something crazy about a person who becomes that
obsessed about his prejudices.  (However, I do occasionally run into
people who are similarly obsessed about the Religious Right or the
like.)
 
Secondly, I think that when someone's work is devoted to present a moral
vision, one expects more of him than of the average person.  One expects
him to be a little more critical before simply buying into conventional
attitudes, prevalent though they may be.  And when the presenter of this
moral vision persists in his anti-semitism even after the repression of
the Nazi regime and its death camps becomes general knowledge, I think it
is forgivable for critics to see this as grounds for rejecting
Pound's entire work.
 
In other words, if Pound's Confucianism did not prevent him from
uncritically accepting a particularly virulent and irrational form of
anti-semitism (which went way beyond a mere attitude of, "I don't like
Jews"), one can't help but question how much value this Confucianism
really has.  (I, for one, certainly don't know the answer to this.)
 
Anti-semitism as Pound had it stems, at least in part, from a
synecdoche.  This synecdoche was common in British colloquial usage a
many decades ago,  when someone in financial difficulties might say, "I
can't see any alternative for myself but to go to the Jews," meaning the
moneylenders.
 
First of all, it is sloppy (but common) thinking to take this synecdoche
for fact, and start thinking of all Jews as being moneylenders, which is
clearly not the case.
 
And secondly, it was extremely shallow thinking for Pound to believe that
the evils of usury and the existing financial system were simply due to
evil individuals, whether Jews or not, and to fail to realize even if
one were to eliminate all the Jews in the world (or to prevent them
from holding positions of financial power), other people would simply
step into those roles and perform them in essentially the same way.  I
do believe that there exist evil people in the world, but in the case
of the financial world, the very nature of the system makes evil
inevitable, no matter how many regulations governments enact.
 
>This imposition of political criteria into the realm of aesthetic judgment is
>our era's rather sad addition to literary criticism. It must be added that
>this program has not been consistently employed on literary authors  either;
>it has been focused on politically right-wing Modernist writers (Pound,
>Yeats, Celine, Eliot) but not on their left-wing counterparts (Mayakovsky,
>Sartre, the French Surrealists).
>
>I, for one, do not wish to see it employed at all. The scholarly books that
>I referred to as "mean-spirited and ridiculous" were ones which employed some
>version of this political/moral fallacy. In so far as Poundian scholars and
>critics are responsible for the formation of taste in their day, these
>authors have not only been irresponsible but actively harmful to the Poundian
>scholarship they claim to represent.  In this regard, I consider them not
>only enemies of the poet they unfairly disparage, but enemies of literature.
>
>These critics have, however, raised one important issue, which is the oldest
>one: the morality of art. Should morality intrude at all into literary
>judgment? Without restating all the Aristotelian and Platonic positions and
>all the artistic creeds, I would submit that the degree to which Pound's
>fascist and antisemitic opinions enter into literary judgment is the degree
>to which they enter into the poetry (as opposed to the prose, the letters,
>the radio speeches, ad infinitum). Such opinions appear in Pound's poetry
>only in The Cantos and there very infrequently. There are perhaps, if one
>compiled the passages, three or four pages of objectionable material in a
>poem stretching some 800 pages.
 
Pound himself was the one who insisted that the primary value of his work
was moral.
 
>Pound simply cannot be made into "the poet laureate of Nazism" as one critic
>has asserted. However the question, of the intersection of art and evil, is a
>fascinating one. And there is another poet who more consistently exemplifies
>the problem,  an author who today receives universal praise: Baudelaire. But
>this leads us to another issue, altogether.
 
I doubt that the Nazis would have found Pound an acceptable poet
laureate.
 
Pound's "Fascism" is a separate issue, which I don't have time to go into
at the moment.  Suffice it to say that I believe critism of him on this
ground is an example of the way in which the use of labels instead of
real understanding only fogs the issue.  What do we mean when we say
that Pound was a "Fascist"?  Are we saying that he was a member of the
Fascist party or wore a black shirt and marched around beating people
up?
 
Pound certainly did believe that the Fascist government was, on the
whole, a good thing.  This may have been a major failure of judgement
(Pound's political judgement was not very good in any case), but I
don't see it as a moral failure.  Certainly much less so than that of
the many intellectuals who supported Stalinism.
 
And a fortiori that of the many American governments who have supported
regimes in Chile, Argentina, Samoza's Nigaragua, the Dominican
Republic, Spain, Greece, Vietnam, Taiwan, etc. which were at least as
bad as Mussolini's.
 
--Lee Lady <Http://www2.Hawaii.Edu/~lady/>