I didn't think much useful would come out of Wei's posts.
Yet, here we have Tom Romano's response with Carrol Cox's
additions.

Makes me wonder how much "demonizing" is actually bouc
émissaire.

This is news to me. Yet I'm not surprised. I remember this
kind of "science" when I was a kid. Nor am I surprised at
books being suppressed.

BTW, Eimi is available on http://www.abesbook.com, cheapest price
about 20. Other copies go for absurd prices. I'm checking
this weekend at McMurtry's Book Up in Archer City, TX. He
has no index of his books, so it's hunt and hope.

Now, I'll also look for Wyndham Lewis.

--
John K. Taber


-----Original Message-----
From: - Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Carrol Cox
Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2000 5:48 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Pound , Censorship and "Social Darwinism"


Tim Romano wrote:

>
> To demonize Pound by linking him to the harsh political acts/sins
against
> mankind/atrocities/draconian measures (however one wishes to
characterize
> them) of the leaders, ancient and modern, whom Pound chooses to exalt
for
> some quality or qualities they possessed, gives the false impression
that
> Pound was not a product of his times; it suggests that his views were
so
> exterme that he was on the fringes. But these views were common,
almost
> "mainstream."  The record of these times has been distorted and
purged.

This whole post is of extreme interest, but I wish only to expand on a
couple
of points. To put this paragraph another way, in order to conceal the
tracks
of racism and authoritarianism in u.s. imperialism it is necessary to
demonize
Pound and others and (as Tim notes below) actually conceal the existence
of some writers. Back in the era of Trumanism (misnamed McCarthyism)
great fun was had by all in reference to Soviet rewriting of history.
The
process Tim describes in this post is much more democratic or at least
more sophisticated. Some of that history is being dug up however,
revealing that eugenics was not only a "scientific" position but
embodied
in the actual proceedings of a number of state governments -- and even
in social-democratic Sweden. Pound has nothing over Woodrow Wilson
as a racist. And when someone "accused" Eisenhower of being Jewish,
his response was not "SoWhat!" but "THAT'S A LIE!" In the late
1960s Princess Margaret at a banquet given in her honor by Mayor
Daley of Chicago was overheard dismissing the Irish as dirty like
pigs. And the Blackfoot Nation is attempting to sue Canada for the
genocidal special boading schools into which for half a century they
kidnapped Indian children. (The schools, many of them church-
operated, do fit fairly closely the definitions of genocide in
international
treaties.) The U.S. while keeping Pound in the Pisan DTC was
dismantling the local governments established by peasants in  Korea
after the defeat of Japan and replacing them with the quislings who had
served the Japanese. Shoot Quisling in Norway -- make his Korean
equivalent, Synghman Rhee, dictator of Korea. Pound is right for
the wrong reasons about the various war-crimes trials.

> Other artists have been long ignored, their works allowed to go out of
print
> or rot in basements. I spent 8 years studying literature, from the
late '70s
> through the mid '80s and did not see the name of the painter and
> man-of-letters Wyndham Lewis mentioned even once in any course
description,
> or hear his name mentioned by any teacher or colleague --the man whom
T.S.
> Eliot called "the greatest prose writer of my generation"-- and when I
did
> learn about Lewis, it was impossible to find copies of his many works
> anywhere; in some instances, the works had been removed from the
shelves.

I find this astounding. The marxist critic Frederick Jameson wrote a
book on
Wyndham Lewis. I haven't read it, but I would agree with what I
understand
was one of its theses, that we have something to learn from the artists
who
celebrated Fascism. Fascism was a strange blend. In its material
existence
it had no ideology  but was completely arbitrary. It *needed*, however,
the appearance of an ideology, and the first-rate writers (Lewis and
Pound
not the only ones) who in a sense provided that ideology are important.
This is another way of saying that the Mussolini of the Cantos both is
and (more importantly) is *not* the Mussolini of history.

Consider the lines:

            Adolf furious from perception.
                    But there is a blindness that comes from inside --
            they try to explain themselves out of nullity.
                                    (104/761 [1998 printing])

Adolf does not deserve the compliment -- but it is still a profoundly
true
insight into the lives of many in the last century. I am battling now on
another list with two political friends who are being drive to a blind
fury
by their perception of the facts of global warming. It is not impossible
that
some like them may end up supporters of some new Fuerher.

> I
> happen to know that rare scientific works on eugenics are being
removed from
> the shelves of a major university to be stored offsite, not in a
special
> archive, but in an area devoted to superseded or discredited volumes
which
> are destined eventually for the incinerator, while the pulp fiction
section
> is growing larger. There's a painting by Augustus John of the South
African
> poet Roy Campbell locked away in a basement in an art museum in
Pittsburgh
> PA, where it has been out of sight for maybe 40 years. e.e. cumming's
work
> EIMI is also out of print.  Pound's translation of Moscardino is out
of
> print.
>
> If I had the broadcasts to hand, I would cite the passage where Pound
writes
> that it does not matter what the artist believes he is making or
doing; if
> he sincerely reports what his eyes are observing, his works will
reflect the
> times.

"Reflect" is almost too weak here. The future will not be too wrong if
in
looking back on this and the last century, trying to make sense of the
long fallen U.S. empire, they take the Cantos as their guide. Nor would
"Furious from perception" be an unfair epitaph for Pound himself --
see the earlier lines:

                        and the light became so bright and so blindin'
            in this layer of paradise
                        that the mind of man was bewildered.
                                            (38/190)
It seems to me that a poet who sees so much is forgiveable for being
such a fucking fool in his interpretation of what he saw. And  if one
focuses on it in this way, there is less a conflict than is often
assumed
by both his friends and enemies between the "aestehtics" of Pound's
poem and its substance -- nor is so necessary to labor painfully to
separate what one approves of and what one disapproves of in the
poem's substance.

Carrol Cox