[log in to unmask],.Internet writes:
>Dear Pound scholars,

>I have been asked to edit a special, American number of the British
>annual,
>*Keywords: A Journal of Cultural Materialism*. The topic will be Raymond
>Williams and Modernism, and this special issue will be *Keywords* 4.
>Papers
>might either construe Williams' work in the context of modernist
>critical
>activity, or take up modernist activity (or some single work) in terms
>of
>Williams' critical precepts. I'd be pleased to see someone develop
>relations
>between Poundian notions of "sagetrieb" or "culture" and Williams's
>notion
>of "Structures of feeling," but I'm open to any interesting proposals.

>Anyone interested in contributing should send an abstract of
>approximately
>250-300 words to me, by e-mail preferably, to the following address:
><[log in to unmask]> . My deadline for completed essays will be in
>December, but I'd like to see proposals as soon as possible.

Dear Michael,

I'm very intrigued by this possibility, because Raymond Williams had a
major formative influence on my thinking, from 1959, when I first read
Culture and Society, through the 1980s. His books are all still lined
up on my shelves, although I haven't spent a lot of time with them for
the last decade.  But I'd like to go back to Williams, to assess what
is still alive and what is dated in his thinking.

I've long been inclined (see my essay on "Pound and Fascism" from 1983)
to read Pound's political/social thinking as a form of Ruskinism gone
wrong; and I certainly see Williams as carrying forward the tradition
of Ruskin and Morris (and, a little later, R.H. Tawney) into the 20th
century. Putting Pound next to Williams, I see, in effect, a
confrontation between "right" and "left" Ruskinites.  I believe that it
was Alexandre Kojeve who described World War II as a battle between the
Left Hegelians and the Right Hegelians. That may have been true in
continental Europe, but what Hegel represented for the continent,
Ruskin represented for the Anglo-American world: he detected a rupture
between the economy (the means of production) and the culture (the
symbol systems in terms of which we try to understand the world), and
he saw this rupture as a crisis that undermined any effort to achieve
"unity of being" (Yeats). The "left" Ruskinites have insisted that this
rupture can be healed only by addressing the structural injustices
created by the new economy, and by developing an educational system
that will make available to all people the richer structures of feeling
nurtured  by a genuine literacy.  On the other hand, the "right"
Ruskinites, terrified by the Rise of the Masses (Ortega y Gasset), have
sought to create a citadel in which culture will be protected from the
rising tide of barbarism.

In some respects, Pound is a typical Right Ruskinite. Like other "high"
Modernists, he spoke with scorn of the Great Unwashed. But the picture
is complicated by the fact that he was an American with strong populist
instincts. In the United States during the 19th Century, "culture," in
the Arnoldian sense, was in effect equated with the genteel tradition,
and Pound, like other American modernists, was fiercely critical of
that tradition. (See Lentricchia on the responses of Frost, Stevens,
Pound, and Eliot to this tradition.) At the same time, although an
ideological anti-Semitism becomes a major force in his thinking only in
the late 1930s, Pound was, like Eliot and Stevens and other American
modernist writers, acutely aware from childhood that his Anglo-Saxon
America was being engulfed by waves of immigrants. His reaction, on the
level of pure feeling, was a deep discomfort, which by the time of the
Rome radio broadcasts became a conviction that the "real" America of
Jefferson and Adams had been destroyed in the aftermath of the Civil
War.

Pound resolved this contradiction (he loathed the genteel postures of
American Anglo-American culture, but he found it impossible to identify
with the emergent multi-cultural America) by escaping to Europe, and by
erecting in his mind an idealized heritage of European culture that had
survived down through the centuries (Eliot helped him here).Positioning
himself within the European (and specifically British) cultural scene
of the 1910s and 1920s, Pound picked up on many Ruskinian themes,
through Orage and the Guild Socialist group. (Both Tawney and Major
Douglas emerged out of this group, the first moving left and the second
moving right.) But as an expatriate American, Pound was never forced to
define the relationship between culture and politics, as they were
evolving in Britain itself: that is, he did not need to work through
his relationship with the British people and their complex class
fissures and loyalties, simply because he was not British. Thus Pound's
cultural politics, in Britain until 1920 as in Italy later, has a
peculiarly abstract character: he never makes the link, absolutely
central to Williams, between culture and society.

As an American, Pound could make that link in an effective way only in
America. Not until his St. Elizabeths years was he in a position to
make such a link, and then he allied himself with the most reactionary
strains in American nativism. But even at this stage of his life, he
was still, in however deluded a way, pursuing a Ruskinian vision of a
world in which the craftsman would own the tools of his trade and would
control the fruits of his labor.  Pound never found a way of making the
link between culture and society in a way that would allow him to
participate effectively in the political life of any community. Here a
contrast with Tawney, who became the moral and intellectual mentor of
the British Labour party, becomes useful.  Was Williams himself able to
play a similar role?  Certainly he aspired to be such a public
intellectual, in the tradition of Tawney, but I don't know enough about
his career to say whether he succeeded.

End of abstract.  Obviously, I'm here thinking aloud, so this is a bit
formless. As I wrote, for example, I became intrigued by the
possibility of putting Eliot into the picture too, as another
expatriate Ruskinian. But what most deeply impressed me about  Williams
was his ability to think historically. I read The Long Revolution  in
the 1970s or early 1980s, and the vision he there unfolds has sustained
me in some dark hours. (But the long revolution seems to be stalled at
the moment. Can Nader restart it?) I think that we need to put Pound,
and espcially his politics, into an historical context, and that's what
I would try to do in this essay.  I might mention that I also have a
half-completed essay on Pound's relationship with Henry and Brooks
Adams that pursues some of these same themes. In a pinch, perhaps I
could try to finish this essay and adapt it for your purposes.

Well, let me know what you think.

Best wishes, Burt Hatlen