Dear Poundians: I've just finished Leon Surette's latest work, Pound in Purgatory, and I hope that it isn't too presumptuous of me to think that a few comments might get some discussion going. As I might have predicted, this work is now essential reading for anyone interested in the intellectual context in which Pound developed--it would take an expert on Pound's mysticism to confront Pound's economics! The book is amazingly erudite and yet quite readable, especially when it comes to economic theory--clearly it will be the final word on Pound's relationship to European economic traditions. I do, however, think that the book shortchanges the extent to which Pound was influenced by American ideas about money. This may be because Leon focuses on the post-World War I period. But Pound was, contrary to what Leon says, quite engaged with economics via Populism and his father's work much, much earlier. The same is true, I think, as regards Pound's anti-semitism, which Leon sees as a phenomenon of the 1930s and after. If we think about Pound's anti-semitism not as an intellectual phenomenon, as Leon does, but rather as a form of passionate or even religious folly that reflects an engagement with both real Jews and an imaginary "Jew," then we must be interested in the 1890s. And one last thing: the notion that the Nazi genocide of the Jews came as a surprise to Pound in 1945, which Leon promotes, simply doesn't hold up. Detailed, accurate, and reliable reports of concentration camps were available in mainstream American newspapers and radio reports throughout the 1930s, and news of genocide came as early as 1941 in Yiddish newspapers in America and then later that year in the New York Times. The BBC reported in June of 1942 that 700,000 Jews had been murdered by the Nazis, and news of systematic extermination was available in all of the major American newspapers and wire services, as well as on the floor of Congress. In 1944, American, British, and Swiss newspapers offered details of gas chambers at Auschwitz. The news was also spread via leaflets dropped in Italy by Allied planes. Even if Pound discounted all of this as Allied propaganda, we ought to remember that spreading this news was one of the major activities of Italy's anti-fascist underground, a movement that Pound was in touch with for much of the war. Apologies for the length of these remarks, but Leon's book, for which I waited far too long to read, deserves detailed attention by the best minds we've got on this list--and some thorough discussion here. Jonathan Gill Columbia University