I don't understand why Ms. Miyake assumes that
Pound would have had to read a particular book,
by Webster or anyone, in 1940 to have formed
antisemitic opinions which were well in evidence
by the 1930s.  Pound would have heard about the
"Protocols of Zion" possibly as early as 1921,
when they were exposed for a fakery in the London
Times.
 
==Dan Pearlman
 
 
At 06:12 AM 1/28/98 +0900, you wrote:
>Colleagues,
>I have a question on Nesta Webster. Leon Surette, in his _The Birth of
>Modernism_, conjectures that Pound read her_ Secret Societies and
>Subversive Movements_(pulshd in 1924) around 1940(Surette, 23, 47).
>But I am afraid his reasoning for the dating is not so persuasive.
>He points out that she identifies in an appendix the source of the
>_Protocols_ but that she asserts the plausibility of the forgery book,
>which the poet read in 1940. That is to say, Surette's dating is based
>on the assumption that reading Webster led to the immediate reading the
>_Protocols_.
>The assumption premises that Pound read Webster's book with interest.
>But her book finds(of course erroneously) in Pan-Germanic Movement one
>of the instruments "conspiratorial Jews" are maneuvering from behind the
>scenes. And around 1940 Social Nationalism was explicitly and fatally
>cruel to Jews and Jewish people, and Pound knew that. If the poet had
>read the book around that time, he would have believed that the book was
>a mere ridiculous fantasy. If he thought Webster was trustworthy,as
>he did, Pound had to read her earlier, when he was not interested in
>German policy against Jews.
>Is there someone who have evidence enough to fix the date of when the
>poet read Webster? I ask this question because the book is very important
>in its influence on the formation of Pound's anti-semitic thought.
>
>
>akiyoshi miyake
>home:[log in to unmask]
>office:[log in to unmask]
>
Dan Pearlman
Department of English
University of Rhode Island
Kingston, RI 02881
 
[Latest book: novel, BLACK FLAMES, White Pine Press, 1997]
 
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