There seems to me to be a lot of sense in Kevin Kiely's views about the Rome broadcasts. They are not texts for close reading. They represent a part of the Pound story which is in a sense tragic, in another sense appallingly banal. Pound's delight in Mussolini's supposed knowledge of and insight into the Cantos - "MA QVESTO said the Boss, e divertente / catching the point before the aesthetes had got there" - is simply *stupid*. Even Lord Haw Haw seems to have found Pound's rants impossibly boring (I'm referring to the bit in Carpenter's biography describing the Pound/Haw Haw correspondence). Poor Pound. I wish he hadn't gone down that route. What more is there to say? Richard Edwards >From: kevinkkiely <[log in to unmask]> >Reply-To: - Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine > <[log in to unmask]> >To: [log in to unmask] >Subject: Wei's molehill? >Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2000 19:48:49 +0100 > >As the list-member who claims to have interjected the Hitler/Joan of Arc >quote from Pound into the list's mail, who now wishes to comment on/to Lin >Wei >1. Pound quotes Pirandello's being anti-Freud while commenting on Cocteau, >so perhaps there is no use in applying Freud to Pound? Jung is quoted by >Pound in his introduction to a selection from the Cantos, so perhaps >putting >Pound through Jung's sieve is valid? >2. You really made a mountain out of a molehill re Pound's feisty comment >"Hitler was a Jeanne d'Arc, a saint. He was a martyr." Pound's broadcasting >was driven primarily by his personal reaction to the war & his adulation of >Mussolini (having had an audience with him in 1933) and prior to that >having >written some 'fan letters' to Il Duce including advice re economics etc. > >The fact that Pound believed that both Axis dictators (Hit & Muss) actually >had any interest in Confucius is daftness on his part. Mussolini claimed to >have read some of the Cantos and Pound was very pleased if not overwhelmed. >However much later, in desperation Pound began broadcasting, and the tone >of >the broadcasts is desperate throughout with the exception of a few for >instance the one on Joyce; if he had been tanked up on whiskey during >broadcasts he might have been less inflamatory by being less intelligible >and certainly what he hates he makes plain and clear, but anyone can see it >all comes "from the heat oppressed brain" rather than his better self. > >He may have felt silenced by the war and did feel snubbed by the US >government when prior to the outbreak of war, having made an effort to >speak >with President Roosevelt instead speaking with Secretary Wallace. Poets and >such writers broadcasting, has become a brief of the present List member >who >is completing the biography of Francis Stuart, the Irish poet/novelist who >broadcast on Berlin radio 1940-44 along with Lord Haw Haw and others. >Stuart's first wife Iseult Gonne (daughter of Maud Gonne) was the mistress >of Pound & also Wyndham Lewis. Writers such as Pound & Stuart broadcast for >the Axis powers in an effort to seek personal martyrdom, alienation, >repudiation and ultimately the insights of the outsider which are part of >the complex personality of such persons. Hence, all of Pound's remarks on >Rome radio can be seen in the light of the rebel bawling at the world or >trying to, undignified and dangerous as it was, if not callously inciteful >to the greater evils of the war. > >Then naturally Pound would blurt out such dissonances as the one about >Hitler & Joan of Arc; and stand on board the liner Cristoforo Colombo and >allow himself to be photographed giving the fascist salute having arriving >in Naples after his release from St Elizabeth's in 1958. He also told >reporters then, that "All America is an insane asylum". It is obvious that >Pound had 'mental breakdowns' if not before the war then certainly at Pisa >after his capture; this is not to denigrade his writings as those of a >madmen, far from it, he paid dearly for his writings in passing through the >veil of madness and returning, perhaps as T.S. Eliot claimed, "neither >sane, >nor insane" but anyway by whose standards of normalcy. So your extended but >interesting prolixity re Pound's Hitler/Joan of Arc comment tended to the >obsessive and the redundant. Similarly with Pound and those who abhor him, >come across as phobic and tending to racism like himself; those who take >his >best work from the dross he produced are the wisest, who recognise the best >Cantos from the worst and the latter far outweight the former, however >Pound >tends to have his idolators who see him as a scholargod and a masterpoet >throughout like Shakespeare & Browning. Yes his best poems are great stuff >but not the secondary work which stinks of the lamp. ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com